This project considers the development of the cultural landscape of Native American chiefdoms in the Yazoo Basin of northwestern Mississippi. Chronicles written by certain members of the Hernando de Soto expedition offer exciting glimpses into the landscape and lifeways of Native American societies in 1541, but they do not shed light on how the landscape of chiefdoms in the Lower Mississippi Valley developed during the period before Spanish contact. This dissertation research focuses on the time period just before Spanish contact, the Mississippi Period (AD 1200-1540), and on Mississippian culture, and it investigates how monuments were built and used in a rapidly changing and dynamic landscape, one in which the meandering and flooding Mississippi river affected the long-term formation of social and political networks. This research relies on environmental, ethnohistoric, and archaeological data to provide a historically contingent description of the processes leading to the development of one of the largest and most important archaeological sites in the region. Sediment cores excavated in mound and off-mound contexts suggest the site was constructed over a crevasse splay, a high-elevation landform. Both coring data and trench excavation demonstrate that Mound D, the largest mound at Carson, was built in four stages and that stages II and III were the largest stages. Excavations on Mound D demonstrate that a moderately large-sized structure was once constructed on the southwest corner of the mound summit and that the structure was used to produce craft goods such as shell beads, shell gorgets, and statuary. Data from mound construction and craft production, as well as ethnohistoric and geomorphic research, are used to describe social organization, hierarchy, and leadership at Carson. / 1 / Jayur Madhusudan Mehta

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The Bluefield Formation (Chesterian, Upper Mississippian) of the Appalachian Basin is a lithologically variable unit, composed of mudstones lithofacies with subordinate amounts of sandstone and limestone. By analyzing sedimentology and the prominence of ostracodes, an ostracode biofacies model was generated that provides a large-scale paleoenvironmental framework for the Bluefield Formation. Three ostracode assemblages were defined in an effort to identify environmental conditions during deposition of the Bluefield: Assemblage I - Polytylites Assemblage; Assemblage II - Sansabella Assemblage; and Assemblage III - Whipplella Assemblage. The assemblage distributions indicate that nearshore transitional marine environments were common and normal open marine conditions were very rare. The variable units and upward-shallowing sequences in the Bluefield reflect changes in the influx of freshwater that caused salinity fluctuations. Within the depositional environments of the Bluefield Formation, salinity was the most important controlling factor in the ostracode distribution.

The Mississippian period in the American Bottom experienced a rapid influx of people during a period of culture change after AD 1050. During this time, people moved into the area, political, religious, and economic ways of life became drastically different from those who inhabited the region only a generation before. An estimated 30 percent of the population came from areas outside of the American Bottom. From 2008-2012, a large archaeological project at the East St. Louis Precinct of the American Bottom resulted in the uncovering of many ceramic vessels, however only three percent of these were identified as nonlocal during analysis. The purpose of this study is to determine if these nonlocal pots are made with clays similar to the local samples from the site in order to better understand the process of migration and importance of exotic goods in the region. This project uses X-ray fluorescence to analyze the elemental makeup of the ceramics to test if they were produced locally, with similar clays to local samples, or if they were likely imported into the area from their sources. The results concluded that most of the nonlocal samples tested were geochemically similar to the locally produced vessels. There are several vessels that appear geochemically different from the local samples.

Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-229). Also available on microfilm.

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Master of Science / Department of Geology / Matthew W. Totten / The Meramec member of Mississippian age is a proficient oil and gas producing formation within the midcontinent region of the United States. It is produced in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. In Kansas, 12% of the state’s petroleum production comes from Mississippian-aged rocks. Bindley Field, located in central west Kansas, has produced 3,669,283 barrels of oil from one facies within the M2 interval of the Meramec formation. This facies is a grain-supported echinoderm/bryozoan dolostone, of variable thickness. Its sporadic occurrence in the subsurface has made exploring Bindley Field and the surrounding area difficult. The challenge in finding oil in this area is in locating a producible zone of this productive facies. Previously, Bindley Field has been the subject of detailed reservoir characterization studies (Ebanks et al., 1977; Johnson, 1990; Johnson, 1994). These studies helped to contribute to a better understanding of Meramecian stratigraphy in Kansas. The Meramec was divided into four major depositional sequences, with some of those sequences nonexistent in the subsurface, due to aerial exposure and erosion post-deposition. The Meramecian units were further separated into parasequence-scale chronostratigraphic units based on marine flooding events. The primary producing interval in Bindley Field is the Meramec 2 interval which consists of seven lithotypes, and is recognized to have six, meter-scale depositional cycles (Johnson, 1990). As production from this interval increased, more information became available about controls on reservoir quality. There are still areas, however, where core data do not exist, and predicting the productive facies remains challenging. The aim of this study is to create a workflow for evaluating the subsurface using regional core and log data from Bindley Field to create a model of the subsurface distribution of the reservoir facies, which could be extended to data poor areas. Geophysical logs (neutron, gamma ray, guard) along with an artificial neural network (ANN), was used to create an accurate prediction of producing intervals within the subsurface. Values are derived from wire line log data and used to develop the ANN definition of facies distribution within Bindley Field. The ANN model was examined for accuracy and precision using core description and well cuttings from wells within Bindley Field and the surrounding area. Correlations were found between the subsurface geometry of the study area, and the production of oil and gas within the study area. An ANN model with an accuracy of 72% was achieved and applied to wells surrounding the Bindley Field, where reservoir intervals have not been as extensively studied. A total of 87 wells in Bindley Field and the surrounding 50 square mile area where applied to the ANN model. The model predicted that the productive facies thickens gradually to the northwest of Bindley Field. Cross sections as well as an isopach map were created using the prediction data from the ANN. Finally, an analysis for the accuracy of the ANN and the predicted facies was created. The productive facies yielded an accuracy value of 77%.

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This work is all about things. It is about the role that those things play in the human experience, and what they offer to us as archaeologists, whose job is to provide a glimpse into the lives of past peoples. I discuss the things of the past from the theoretical stance of materiality, which assures us that the past is accessible despite the fragmentary nature of its physical remains. This is so because the physical world - objects, landscapes, and space - are imbued with meaning through our interactions with and experiences of them, be they overt and intentional or subconscious and in the background of our active lives. Repeated engagement with the physical world creates habits, memories, and histories and inscribes the social processes that created them upon the tangible world in ways that allow us to interpret the lives of the people with whom we have no direct interaction or accounts. I use this theory to explore the southern Illinois site of Kincaid Mounds during the latter portion of its Mississippian period occupation, with a focus on how community was constructed and maintained within and through time. I do so using evidence from the non-discursive aspects of ceramic and architectural manufacture under the assumption that the methods of producing these items are habituated and thus reveal communities of learning. I consider contextual evidence to determine what other factors may have been at play in the production of these goods. With statistical analyses, I explore the variation in the way things were made between several spatially discrete neighborhoods at Kincaid Mounds, and discuss those results in terms of the making and manipulation or maintenance of community at this pre-Columbian center, followed by a narrative history of the Middle and Late Kincaid phases. I contrast these finds with those of communities within two other Middle Mississippian regions, Greater Cahokia and the Central Illinois River Valley, in order to discuss the variable processes that led diverse and unique communities to participate in a much broader, imagined Mississippian community.