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Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions
In recent decades anthropology, especially ethnography, has supplied the prevailing models of how human beings have constructed, and been constructed by, their social arrangements. In turn, archaeologists have all too often relied on these models to reconstruct the lives of ancient peoples. In lively, engaging, and informed prose, Timothy Pauketat debunks much of this social-evolutionary theorizing about human development, as he ponders the evidence of 'chiefdoms' left behind by the Mississippian culture of the American southern heartland. This book challenges all students of history and prehistory to reexamine the actual evidence that archaeology has made available, and to do so with an open mind.
270 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2007
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About the author
Timothy R. Pauketat
29 books15 followersTim Pauketat is an archaeologist and professor of Anthropology and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He previously taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo and the University of Oklahoma. Professor Pauketat is interested in the study of ancient religion and urbanism, and has been excavating the pre-Columbian colonies and pilgrimage sites of the Cahokian civilization around St. Louis north into Wisconsin. The author or editor of a dozen scholarly books, Tim also writes for nonprofessional audiences, recently including a book entitled Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin, 2010).
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October 31, 2015
Pauketat is clearly exercised about something here, but I have to say that for a non-archaeologist, it's a little unclear what that might be. Thus the four -- I got a lot of useful information from the book, but it could have been expressed much more clearly -- at least for a lay reader.
He mentions dual-processualism and historical processualism, and contrasts these with "evolutionist" perspectives, but I confess that the distinctions were never clear to me --though it was clear they were immensely important to the internal
politics among academic archaeologists -- which in terms of whether it's a difference that makes a difference, perhaps enough said.
The graduate student Pauketat uses as a persona to lay out his arguments initially proposes a dig premised on "a Mississippian polity that arose along the Obion River in the eleventh century AD to offset the risks associated with corn agriculture. Naturally, logically. The people needed management, and a chiefly authority structure evolved to meet the need. She suspects that Obion might have been a complex chiefdom but can't risk saying it, in part because she's been warned by Dr. Science [another persona] to avoid what Jn Muller (1997) calls exaggerationalist inferences. So she settles for a 'simple chiefdom' label.
"She proposes excavations along the site's palisade wall in an area of known domestic occupation that also fronts a small earthen pyramid. The relative dating of domestic features -- houses and storage pits -- in regard to the mound and palisade wall should allow her to gauge public investment in and protection of the central complex through time, an indirect measure of the 'strength of the chiefly authority structure.' The kinds of exotic and craft goods in that refuse, relative to the dietary remains and storage spaces, would provide a measure of whether changes in the site's external alliance structure weakened the administration, causing the population to lose faith and "vote with their feet." (28).
Her advisor is concerned that this isn't testable and that she stick to "the environmental risks that clearly must have underwritten every Mississippian economy"
Cites Agency in Archaeolgy and Companion to Scoial Archaeolgy as influential.
Pauketat sees two problems with chiefdoms:
1. exaggerating the importance of political administrations as if they were the sole source of social change
2. treating Mississippian chiefdoms like cookie-cutter copies of each other. (36)
Partly I'm stymied by my unfamiliarity with the abstract terms: "cutting edge chiefdom theory: political structure -- the various 'institutions' (organizations with their own cultural norms of behavior) -- is an adaptive mechanism that, within certain environmental parameters, causes societies to change in one way or another . . . . Newer models haven't progressed
much beyond the old distinctions made between the managerial and the political theories of social evolution" (38). Huh? I know what the words mean individually, but together they don't make much sense. Although this writing is very different, the effect is similar to that of poststructuralism on my brain. And yet, in a similar way, I keep reading because it just feels as if something important is being conveyed, if only I could figure out what it is.
I think possibly what he's saying is that people act as agents, and that political systems aren't given emergent properties of various environmental phenomena: they are created by people in an ongoing process of negotiation between environmental factors as well as political/social/religious ideological ones. Although if that's what he actually is saying: duh. Do any archaeologists really dispute this, or believe that *only* environmental factors influence societal development and material culture? That seems hardly plausible to me.
Re: the sequelae to Cahokia: "Based on a series of historic accounts from across the sixteenth- through eighteenth-century southeast, V. James Knight (1986) reasonably concluded that there was a suite of political-religious practices involving the curation of ancestors' bones in special charnel houses, or temples, atop platform mounds. Hernando de Soto's men described the contents and significance of such buildings from South Carolina west to Arkansas (where they watched one war party defile the temple of an enemy's town). And at most Mississippian towns, there seems to have been at least one earthen pyramid topped by a temple (Holley 1999; see Chapter 4). Knight also observed that the temples and temple mounds were at the heart of a "threefold system of inferred cult institutions . . . with a chiefly cult of nobility contraposed against a communal
earth/fertility cult [and with] a third priestly type of cult institution . . . in a mediatory structural role" (Knight 1986;681)" (41). Now, that I can get my mind around.
So Pauketat seems to be arguing that (a) political administrations aren't the only sources of change (b) local factors affect local history and therefore, there were "locally divergent histories of temples and mounds in Mississippian cultures. So we can ask: "How far back can we project the temple-related institutions? Were Mississippian temple practices politicized versions of pre-Mississippian ones? How many of the people affiliated with a temple had the same understanding of what the temple and mound represented? Whose bones were kept in a particular temple? Whose were excluded? Who labored on a particular pyramid, when, and why? Did they do it to build an impressive platform for a specific functional reason?" (41).
Pauketat cites himself arguing "no Mississippian platforms and few other central features were constructed as one-time labor projects. All appear, at present, to have been incremental constructions, with the early 'stages' of some . . . mounds being no more than sheer mantles of silt or sand laid down to ritually sterilize the area. From this, we may infer that the central point of mound construction was not simply to construct an imposing tumulus" (Pauketat 2000b:120).
"appearances are deceptive . . . [and we cannot] assume that all flat-topped pyramid mounds -- even within just one region or during just one phase --meant the same thing or functioned in the same ways" (Pauketat and Alt 2003:163). Bot the meanings and the proposed functions of any mound might well have been contested through time at some central place. After all, pyramids were 'features of living landscapes, observed by all, recollected differently by many, [and] liable to be co-opted' by communities, factions, or specific individuals (Pauketat and Alt 2003:171). (42)
"In the end, many different people continuously built mound meanings and functions, including those in attendance at huge certain public ceremonies and those with varying memories of what mounds meant. The mound builders probably came from many different backgrounds, with at least as many different understandings of what earthen construction meant. So the mounds were not simply _reflections- of political institutions as they were. Mounds and mound building were the institutions _coming into being_ (42)." Now, this does sound explicitly post-structuralist, and self-evident, to me. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not mean one thing. It meant one thing in the 80s when it was designed, and some were upset that it was designed by an Asian woman. Some hated the black granite and the design. Since then it has become more accepted part of the narrative of what Vietnam was and meant, partly through additions to the monument in response to criticisms.
"When did such institutions cease becoming? Never. Institutions are always under construction, literally and figuratively. Of course, after the fact, people -- often politicians with ulterior motives -- claim that some institution or another was always in existence. But their political narratives are always based on their political interests at the time" (42 -- similar to way biblical literalists retroject their very modern understanding of how to read a text far into the past).
"Possibly the outcome of their pyramid building was a far cry from their original motivations for building with earth. We don't know. And we won't know until we stop pretending that the process is somehow devoid of people, or until we actually examine the materiality of mound building as a process in which people also built institutions. We need to examine how the cultural power of these ordinary mound builders caused the ascent of chiefs, not the other way around" (42). This is what makes reading this so confusing for me: I was with him in the premises, but the conclusion doesn't seem to follow. Yes, local actors and histories matter. Yes, institutions are always-already becoming. But "how the cultural power of ordinary mound builders caused the ascent of chiefs?" -- how did we get there? Do we know the mound builders were ordinary? Do we know that they had cultural power (aside from that of resistance, which even slaves have)? Do we know they caused the ascent of chiefs? Pauketat himself is making some pretty big assumptions here.
Contra Yoffee, Pauketat argues that there is a "central role for storytelling in archaeology or that 'having a story in mind is necessary to help us think while we dig' (Hodder 1999:55). Instead, as Dr. Science understands it, research involves testing single, simple (he would say elegant) hypotheses one by one, and he seems to think that small-scale excavations are sufficient to test all of his hypotheses. And given his hypotheses, he's probably right. (44)." Partly Pauketat argues that Dr. Science is satisfied with too little data (one house excavated as evidence for residential as opposed to ceremonial use of a site) 46). Again, duh -- would anyone except archaeologists-for-hire by contractors ever argue anything else?
"What with the legacy of the old mound builder myth and the lingering effects of racism against American Indians in the contemporary world, a position that understates American Indian achievements seems unwise (Kehoe 1998; Pauketat 2004). (147)
Apparently some people (Dr. Science) argue that chiefdoms arose all over southeast as a result of some kind of convergent evolutionary response to similar environmental conditions? If so, that's just plain dumb. The concepts of city, Mother Culture, Cahokia-centric views, and Cahokian influence seem intuitively to make sense. Is Dr. Science's argument that we can't prove people moved from one place to another, carrying their ideas, without plane tickets?
Pauketat argues through the pragmatist persona that "there was nothing else like Cahokia . . . ever .. . at any time before or after. You mean to tell me that it didn't have an effect unlike any before or after?" (50).
He critiques ethnologists who looked for patterns & common attributes of certain societies, but they lacked historical perspective, so "the neoevolutionists necessarily explained change not with reference to actual histories but to an abstract model of cultural systems derived from looking at many societies at single moments in time.
"[but] try explaining the politicians, populations, and social problems in the world today through a comparative study of contemporary nation-states. Ignore the history of European colonization and missionization. Ignore the slave trade,
transglobal mercantilism, and imperial expansions that linked the Old and New Worlds. Pay no attention to migrations, ethnic cleansing, world wars, and the unequal accumulation of economic capital. Forget social movements, rebellions, and revolutions of the past. Don't consider the Cold War, Sputnik, computers, or the Internet. And then try to explain our present-day world." (54). Well, obviously -- is this actually what Dr. Science and the neo-evolutionists argue -- that historical societies can be understood with reference to abstract concepts absent understanding of the various socio-political contexts which shaped and were shaped by them? If so, they sound very stupid, and this seems like a straw man argument.
ethnological and historical studies of the Natchez of seventeenth-century Louisiana reveal ethnic and linguistic pluralism within the region being analyzed; "as disease and death in warring took its toll, the Natchez incorporated others into their polity, and were ultimately themselves scattered and reincorporated into the towns of other confederacies (Iberville and
DuPratz, in Swanton 1998; Muller 1997). Historic confederacies and provinces in pre-Columbian eastern North America were multiethnic aggregations that some feel may have been on the raod to state formation (Muller and Willcox 1999:164)" 57
"The Algonquin-speaking Powhatan of Virginia might not have been multiethnic, but they were circumscribed socially by other 'Alonquian-speaking chiefdoms . . . to the north and south of them, Iroquoian-speaking tribes or chiefdoms . . . in the inner coastal plain to the south of them, and Siouan-speaking tribes or chiefdoms . . . to the west (Rountree and Turner 1998:278; Rountree 1989). They were constantly at war with these outsiders, and Powhatan himself engaged in wars to eliminate these ethnic others, 'depopulating and then repopulating' outlying territories with loyalists and training youth outside of kin groups to be aggressive (Rountree and Turner 1998:281, 285-6), in a historical process paralleling the rise of Shaka Zulu in early-nieteenth-century South Africa (cf. Service 1975)" 57.
two historical processes related to chiefdoms:
1. population displacement or migration: local and long-distance relocations that mix up families to ethnic groups with various cultural identities
2. mitigation of cultural diversity: novel social or political arrangements that resolve the above tensions.
Why relocate? environmental pressure; why not; fissioning to keep order within communities [references argument that "emergent stratification/hiving off of claimants to office would have led to elites and commoners who identified more with their social stratum than with an integrated chiefly community; provided basis for rapid large-scale appearance of Cahokia; later realized should also have considered possibility of migrations contributing to this (59)
evidence from southwest "migrations allow one or more clans to become ritually or economically superordinate over others"
depending on whether immigrants came from the hills or from a land with "a powerful and meaningful history" (59)
historical example of Scioto valley, where "Great Hopewell Road" might have stretched forty-eight kilometers from the Newark earthworks to the numerous enclosed spacesof Chillicothe, oH (Lepper 1998: 129; 2005:79) (69).
"Mississippian is not a political system. It's not a cultural system. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a kind of 'chiefdom society.' It's something much more than this, captured by the realization, among some, that the Mississippian world
transceneded 'linguistic and cultural boundaries as substantial as the differences between medieval Poland and Spain' (Lewis et al 1998:1). Mississippian is probably better considered a transregional sptio-cultural phenomenon -- an ethnoscape' in Arjun Appadurai's (1996) terms -- much like 'civilization' and 'globalization.' [Actually what it sounds like to me is that it was a Big Idea, like Christianity, that transcended different ethnic and geographic differences.]
"Explaining Mississippian, then, is more about seeking to understand Mississippianization -- an uneven historical process in whichpeople politicized maize-based agricultural landscapes and cosmologies in ways contingent on their pasts and on each other" (85).
"early Macon Plateau Mississippians were outsiders who came, saw, and left. Once Macon Plateau was abandoned -- probably close to AD 1200 -- the locality was not reinhabited, suggesting a lingering fear of the place, taboos linked to its former inhabitants, or bad memories of events that happened there. Local folks avoided the locality for generations" (Williams 1994:137). (115).
"Key to [the transregional preeminence of Etowah's people] King (2005) notes, was the adaptation of a foreign mythology consisting of what James Brown (2005a) following Paul Radin (1948) and Robert Hall (1989, 1997) --calls the Morning Star
legend, the mythical struggle of a superhuman bird-man with the forces of death and darkness. That legend is traceable in some ways to the Middle Mississippian peoples near or at Cahokia. That's important, seems equally so at other southern
centers (e.g., there's a huge modeled clay effigy of a bird-man, complete with the characteristic forked eye, on the floor of a burned earth-embanked circular building at Macon Plateau)" (117). They created fictive kin relationships with other nearby groups, "by giving away actual pieces of the mythological story to these distant peers and political wannabes.These pieces of Etwowah included the so-called Braden A copper plates, some of which were cut into smaller pieces for the manufacture of special headdresses" (118).
"With the apparent burning of the palisade wall and the likely sacking of the Etowah site around AD 1375, the elaborate retelling of the Middle Mississippian narrative through art and mortuary theater came to a rather ignominious end (King
2005). Bird-man or Morning Star referents are few to nonexistent in the later Lamar Mississippian complexes. The legitimating story seems to have been intentionally forgotten. By whom? Apparently the masses of people not schooled in the arts and stories of foreign would-be rulers." (118).
122 -- a wall or palisade can be seen as offensive rather than defensive, as it minimizes the number of warriors who need to be left behind for effective defense.
And much, much more that won't fit here.
He mentions dual-processualism and historical processualism, and contrasts these with "evolutionist" perspectives, but I confess that the distinctions were never clear to me --though it was clear they were immensely important to the internal
politics among academic archaeologists -- which in terms of whether it's a difference that makes a difference, perhaps enough said.
The graduate student Pauketat uses as a persona to lay out his arguments initially proposes a dig premised on "a Mississippian polity that arose along the Obion River in the eleventh century AD to offset the risks associated with corn agriculture. Naturally, logically. The people needed management, and a chiefly authority structure evolved to meet the need. She suspects that Obion might have been a complex chiefdom but can't risk saying it, in part because she's been warned by Dr. Science [another persona] to avoid what Jn Muller (1997) calls exaggerationalist inferences. So she settles for a 'simple chiefdom' label.
"She proposes excavations along the site's palisade wall in an area of known domestic occupation that also fronts a small earthen pyramid. The relative dating of domestic features -- houses and storage pits -- in regard to the mound and palisade wall should allow her to gauge public investment in and protection of the central complex through time, an indirect measure of the 'strength of the chiefly authority structure.' The kinds of exotic and craft goods in that refuse, relative to the dietary remains and storage spaces, would provide a measure of whether changes in the site's external alliance structure weakened the administration, causing the population to lose faith and "vote with their feet." (28).
Her advisor is concerned that this isn't testable and that she stick to "the environmental risks that clearly must have underwritten every Mississippian economy"
Cites Agency in Archaeolgy and Companion to Scoial Archaeolgy as influential.
Pauketat sees two problems with chiefdoms:
1. exaggerating the importance of political administrations as if they were the sole source of social change
2. treating Mississippian chiefdoms like cookie-cutter copies of each other. (36)
Partly I'm stymied by my unfamiliarity with the abstract terms: "cutting edge chiefdom theory: political structure -- the various 'institutions' (organizations with their own cultural norms of behavior) -- is an adaptive mechanism that, within certain environmental parameters, causes societies to change in one way or another . . . . Newer models haven't progressed
much beyond the old distinctions made between the managerial and the political theories of social evolution" (38). Huh? I know what the words mean individually, but together they don't make much sense. Although this writing is very different, the effect is similar to that of poststructuralism on my brain. And yet, in a similar way, I keep reading because it just feels as if something important is being conveyed, if only I could figure out what it is.
I think possibly what he's saying is that people act as agents, and that political systems aren't given emergent properties of various environmental phenomena: they are created by people in an ongoing process of negotiation between environmental factors as well as political/social/religious ideological ones. Although if that's what he actually is saying: duh. Do any archaeologists really dispute this, or believe that *only* environmental factors influence societal development and material culture? That seems hardly plausible to me.
Re: the sequelae to Cahokia: "Based on a series of historic accounts from across the sixteenth- through eighteenth-century southeast, V. James Knight (1986) reasonably concluded that there was a suite of political-religious practices involving the curation of ancestors' bones in special charnel houses, or temples, atop platform mounds. Hernando de Soto's men described the contents and significance of such buildings from South Carolina west to Arkansas (where they watched one war party defile the temple of an enemy's town). And at most Mississippian towns, there seems to have been at least one earthen pyramid topped by a temple (Holley 1999; see Chapter 4). Knight also observed that the temples and temple mounds were at the heart of a "threefold system of inferred cult institutions . . . with a chiefly cult of nobility contraposed against a communal
earth/fertility cult [and with] a third priestly type of cult institution . . . in a mediatory structural role" (Knight 1986;681)" (41). Now, that I can get my mind around.
So Pauketat seems to be arguing that (a) political administrations aren't the only sources of change (b) local factors affect local history and therefore, there were "locally divergent histories of temples and mounds in Mississippian cultures. So we can ask: "How far back can we project the temple-related institutions? Were Mississippian temple practices politicized versions of pre-Mississippian ones? How many of the people affiliated with a temple had the same understanding of what the temple and mound represented? Whose bones were kept in a particular temple? Whose were excluded? Who labored on a particular pyramid, when, and why? Did they do it to build an impressive platform for a specific functional reason?" (41).
Pauketat cites himself arguing "no Mississippian platforms and few other central features were constructed as one-time labor projects. All appear, at present, to have been incremental constructions, with the early 'stages' of some . . . mounds being no more than sheer mantles of silt or sand laid down to ritually sterilize the area. From this, we may infer that the central point of mound construction was not simply to construct an imposing tumulus" (Pauketat 2000b:120).
"appearances are deceptive . . . [and we cannot] assume that all flat-topped pyramid mounds -- even within just one region or during just one phase --meant the same thing or functioned in the same ways" (Pauketat and Alt 2003:163). Bot the meanings and the proposed functions of any mound might well have been contested through time at some central place. After all, pyramids were 'features of living landscapes, observed by all, recollected differently by many, [and] liable to be co-opted' by communities, factions, or specific individuals (Pauketat and Alt 2003:171). (42)
"In the end, many different people continuously built mound meanings and functions, including those in attendance at huge certain public ceremonies and those with varying memories of what mounds meant. The mound builders probably came from many different backgrounds, with at least as many different understandings of what earthen construction meant. So the mounds were not simply _reflections- of political institutions as they were. Mounds and mound building were the institutions _coming into being_ (42)." Now, this does sound explicitly post-structuralist, and self-evident, to me. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not mean one thing. It meant one thing in the 80s when it was designed, and some were upset that it was designed by an Asian woman. Some hated the black granite and the design. Since then it has become more accepted part of the narrative of what Vietnam was and meant, partly through additions to the monument in response to criticisms.
"When did such institutions cease becoming? Never. Institutions are always under construction, literally and figuratively. Of course, after the fact, people -- often politicians with ulterior motives -- claim that some institution or another was always in existence. But their political narratives are always based on their political interests at the time" (42 -- similar to way biblical literalists retroject their very modern understanding of how to read a text far into the past).
"Possibly the outcome of their pyramid building was a far cry from their original motivations for building with earth. We don't know. And we won't know until we stop pretending that the process is somehow devoid of people, or until we actually examine the materiality of mound building as a process in which people also built institutions. We need to examine how the cultural power of these ordinary mound builders caused the ascent of chiefs, not the other way around" (42). This is what makes reading this so confusing for me: I was with him in the premises, but the conclusion doesn't seem to follow. Yes, local actors and histories matter. Yes, institutions are always-already becoming. But "how the cultural power of ordinary mound builders caused the ascent of chiefs?" -- how did we get there? Do we know the mound builders were ordinary? Do we know that they had cultural power (aside from that of resistance, which even slaves have)? Do we know they caused the ascent of chiefs? Pauketat himself is making some pretty big assumptions here.
Contra Yoffee, Pauketat argues that there is a "central role for storytelling in archaeology or that 'having a story in mind is necessary to help us think while we dig' (Hodder 1999:55). Instead, as Dr. Science understands it, research involves testing single, simple (he would say elegant) hypotheses one by one, and he seems to think that small-scale excavations are sufficient to test all of his hypotheses. And given his hypotheses, he's probably right. (44)." Partly Pauketat argues that Dr. Science is satisfied with too little data (one house excavated as evidence for residential as opposed to ceremonial use of a site) 46). Again, duh -- would anyone except archaeologists-for-hire by contractors ever argue anything else?
"What with the legacy of the old mound builder myth and the lingering effects of racism against American Indians in the contemporary world, a position that understates American Indian achievements seems unwise (Kehoe 1998; Pauketat 2004). (147)
Apparently some people (Dr. Science) argue that chiefdoms arose all over southeast as a result of some kind of convergent evolutionary response to similar environmental conditions? If so, that's just plain dumb. The concepts of city, Mother Culture, Cahokia-centric views, and Cahokian influence seem intuitively to make sense. Is Dr. Science's argument that we can't prove people moved from one place to another, carrying their ideas, without plane tickets?
Pauketat argues through the pragmatist persona that "there was nothing else like Cahokia . . . ever .. . at any time before or after. You mean to tell me that it didn't have an effect unlike any before or after?" (50).
He critiques ethnologists who looked for patterns & common attributes of certain societies, but they lacked historical perspective, so "the neoevolutionists necessarily explained change not with reference to actual histories but to an abstract model of cultural systems derived from looking at many societies at single moments in time.
"[but] try explaining the politicians, populations, and social problems in the world today through a comparative study of contemporary nation-states. Ignore the history of European colonization and missionization. Ignore the slave trade,
transglobal mercantilism, and imperial expansions that linked the Old and New Worlds. Pay no attention to migrations, ethnic cleansing, world wars, and the unequal accumulation of economic capital. Forget social movements, rebellions, and revolutions of the past. Don't consider the Cold War, Sputnik, computers, or the Internet. And then try to explain our present-day world." (54). Well, obviously -- is this actually what Dr. Science and the neo-evolutionists argue -- that historical societies can be understood with reference to abstract concepts absent understanding of the various socio-political contexts which shaped and were shaped by them? If so, they sound very stupid, and this seems like a straw man argument.
ethnological and historical studies of the Natchez of seventeenth-century Louisiana reveal ethnic and linguistic pluralism within the region being analyzed; "as disease and death in warring took its toll, the Natchez incorporated others into their polity, and were ultimately themselves scattered and reincorporated into the towns of other confederacies (Iberville and
DuPratz, in Swanton 1998; Muller 1997). Historic confederacies and provinces in pre-Columbian eastern North America were multiethnic aggregations that some feel may have been on the raod to state formation (Muller and Willcox 1999:164)" 57
"The Algonquin-speaking Powhatan of Virginia might not have been multiethnic, but they were circumscribed socially by other 'Alonquian-speaking chiefdoms . . . to the north and south of them, Iroquoian-speaking tribes or chiefdoms . . . in the inner coastal plain to the south of them, and Siouan-speaking tribes or chiefdoms . . . to the west (Rountree and Turner 1998:278; Rountree 1989). They were constantly at war with these outsiders, and Powhatan himself engaged in wars to eliminate these ethnic others, 'depopulating and then repopulating' outlying territories with loyalists and training youth outside of kin groups to be aggressive (Rountree and Turner 1998:281, 285-6), in a historical process paralleling the rise of Shaka Zulu in early-nieteenth-century South Africa (cf. Service 1975)" 57.
two historical processes related to chiefdoms:
1. population displacement or migration: local and long-distance relocations that mix up families to ethnic groups with various cultural identities
2. mitigation of cultural diversity: novel social or political arrangements that resolve the above tensions.
Why relocate? environmental pressure; why not; fissioning to keep order within communities [references argument that "emergent stratification/hiving off of claimants to office would have led to elites and commoners who identified more with their social stratum than with an integrated chiefly community; provided basis for rapid large-scale appearance of Cahokia; later realized should also have considered possibility of migrations contributing to this (59)
evidence from southwest "migrations allow one or more clans to become ritually or economically superordinate over others"
depending on whether immigrants came from the hills or from a land with "a powerful and meaningful history" (59)
historical example of Scioto valley, where "Great Hopewell Road" might have stretched forty-eight kilometers from the Newark earthworks to the numerous enclosed spacesof Chillicothe, oH (Lepper 1998: 129; 2005:79) (69).
"Mississippian is not a political system. It's not a cultural system. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a kind of 'chiefdom society.' It's something much more than this, captured by the realization, among some, that the Mississippian world
transceneded 'linguistic and cultural boundaries as substantial as the differences between medieval Poland and Spain' (Lewis et al 1998:1). Mississippian is probably better considered a transregional sptio-cultural phenomenon -- an ethnoscape' in Arjun Appadurai's (1996) terms -- much like 'civilization' and 'globalization.' [Actually what it sounds like to me is that it was a Big Idea, like Christianity, that transcended different ethnic and geographic differences.]
"Explaining Mississippian, then, is more about seeking to understand Mississippianization -- an uneven historical process in whichpeople politicized maize-based agricultural landscapes and cosmologies in ways contingent on their pasts and on each other" (85).
"early Macon Plateau Mississippians were outsiders who came, saw, and left. Once Macon Plateau was abandoned -- probably close to AD 1200 -- the locality was not reinhabited, suggesting a lingering fear of the place, taboos linked to its former inhabitants, or bad memories of events that happened there. Local folks avoided the locality for generations" (Williams 1994:137). (115).
"Key to [the transregional preeminence of Etowah's people] King (2005) notes, was the adaptation of a foreign mythology consisting of what James Brown (2005a) following Paul Radin (1948) and Robert Hall (1989, 1997) --calls the Morning Star
legend, the mythical struggle of a superhuman bird-man with the forces of death and darkness. That legend is traceable in some ways to the Middle Mississippian peoples near or at Cahokia. That's important, seems equally so at other southern
centers (e.g., there's a huge modeled clay effigy of a bird-man, complete with the characteristic forked eye, on the floor of a burned earth-embanked circular building at Macon Plateau)" (117). They created fictive kin relationships with other nearby groups, "by giving away actual pieces of the mythological story to these distant peers and political wannabes.These pieces of Etwowah included the so-called Braden A copper plates, some of which were cut into smaller pieces for the manufacture of special headdresses" (118).
"With the apparent burning of the palisade wall and the likely sacking of the Etowah site around AD 1375, the elaborate retelling of the Middle Mississippian narrative through art and mortuary theater came to a rather ignominious end (King
2005). Bird-man or Morning Star referents are few to nonexistent in the later Lamar Mississippian complexes. The legitimating story seems to have been intentionally forgotten. By whom? Apparently the masses of people not schooled in the arts and stories of foreign would-be rulers." (118).
122 -- a wall or palisade can be seen as offensive rather than defensive, as it minimizes the number of warriors who need to be left behind for effective defense.
And much, much more that won't fit here.
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