Ceramics, Chronology, and Community

Chapter 2 focuses on the choices Mississippian potters made in choosing materials, forming, firing, and decorating their pottery, choices that afford archaeologists a way of organizing material culture in space and time. A ceramics analysis based on types, varieties, and attributes is presented here, resulting in a refinement of the phase chronology for the northern Yazoo Basin. Based on the ceramics analysis, site stratigraphy, radiocarbon dates, and a Correspondence Analysis (CA), two chronological sub-phases were identified and their characteristics described. Parchman I corresponds to the 14th-century occupation at Parchman Place; Parchman II corresponds to the 15th-century occupation.

Mississippian Communities in the Northern Yazoo Basin

This chapter introduces the study of Mississippian communities by reviewing archaeological evidence for Mississippi period sites; social organization and worldview among Mississippian people and their descendants; and theoretical approaches to understanding the nature of human action and constraints on that action. It also reviews what we know of Mississippi period settlement in the northern Yazoo Basin, including the Parchman phase and nearby phases, some of which have been identified as Soto-era provinces or polities. Finally, this chapter provides an overview of archaeological work done at Parchman Place in order to establish what we know of the site’s physical layout and chronology. This includes a description of surface collections, mapping, excavation, and geophysical survey conducted at the site. The radiocarbon (C14) chronology from excavated contexts at Parchman Place is also presented.

Authority, Autonomy, and the Archaeology of a Mississippian Community

This book explores Mississippian communities in the 14th–15th century northern Yazoo Basin through an archaeological case study of Parchman Place, located in present day Coahoma County, Mississippi. Drawing on archaeological evidence for foodways, mound building, and the organization of community space, the book takes the position that community-building by Mississippian people was a process of placemaking that involved repeated re-creations of a distinct worldview in a particular place (or places). Much evidence points toward the tendency for Mississippian social relations to be strongly hierarchical. And yet, archaeological data from Parchman Place and elsewhere suggest that different Mississippian people practiced placemaking and world creation in different ways, through different media, and to achieve different goals. Despite the very visible outcomes of actions taken by powerful people (mound-top residences, palisades, community spatial organization, feasting refuse), community-building was decidedly not the exclusive purview of elite members of Mississippian communities. Rather, spatial and depositional practices indicate that leadership was routinely checked by those who wished to emphasize kin group autonomy and those who valued the maintenance of balance among distinct social groups.

Chaos Theory and the Contact Period in the Southeast

This chapter provides an examination of the Contact era in the Southeast through the lens of Chaos Theory. Everyday life in the protohistoric Native American Southeast was guided by tradition, but it was also affected in seemingly unpredictable ways by colonial exploration, trade, missionization, and settlement. The authors focus on the Yazoo Basin in northwestern Mississippi, the Apalachee province of northern Florida, the Cherokee town areas of southern Appalachia, and the areas of Natchez and Taensa settlements in southwestern Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana. The authors found that everyday life for particular people at particular places was shaped not only by local history and local forces but also by the increasingly global forces of change that affected both native peoples and European colonists.