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ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MOUNDVILLE CHIEFDOM.
Vernon James Knight and Vincas P. Steponaitis
(eds) 1998. Smithsonian Institution Press,
Washington DC. ISBN 1–56098–846–0
(hardback). Pp. xx + 203. Price $USD45:00
Matthew Campbell (University of Sydney,
Australia)
I have to say from the outset that I was
somewhat disappointed by this book. I had
hoped for a comprehensive overview of this
important site complex, an introduction
to the site, a history of investigation
and a discussion of problems and future
directions, but this was not to be. Despite
the production values — nice creamy
acid free paper, tasteful layout and attractive
binding — this is not a book aimed
at the general professional reader. For
one thing, there is no map showing where
the site is, though we eventually learn
that it is located in Alabama on the Black
Warrior River (I have looked it up in my
atlas for you, the Black Warrior is a tributary
of the Alabama, which flows into the Gulf
of Mexico about 150 km east of the Mississippi
Delta. Moundville is about 200 km inland
from the Gulf). Neither is there any comprehensive
background of Moundville, locating it with
reference to the broader "Mississippian"
culture. The book, then, is aimed at those
who already know the site and understand
its place in the broader scheme. It comes
out of a 1993 symposium of an SAA meeting,
and little attempt seems to have been made
to integrate the various contributions.
This I find a great pity, but having got
that off my chest, it remains a book well
worth examining for what it is.
Moundville is, as Christopher Peebles attests
in the Foreword, important for a number
of reasons. Firstly, it has been preserved
from looting, development or natural destruction.
The site had been the focus of research
for over a century, much of it meticulous
and well documented. More is known about
this site than any comparable site or complex
in the American Southeast. To which I might
add that for researchers interested in prehistoric
chiefdoms Moundville is an important example,
and any student reading on settlement patterns
will (I should hope) have some familiarity
with the site. Moreover, the de Soto expedition
of 1540 came through this area towards the
end of the Moundville sequence, and the
Spanish contribution to social collapse
and depopulation remains a hot topic —
but more of that later. Suffice it to say
that Moundville is an important site complex,
which explains my disappointment that this
book was aimed more at the specialist than
the general reader (not that the authors
ever make any claim otherwise).
In Chapter 1; A New History of Moundville,
the editors summarise the Moundville sequence.
This is the closest we come to a general
introduction, assuming that the reader understands
the broader Late Woodland and Mississippian
cultures. Putting the summary first is,
in this context, a sensible option. Knight
and Steponaitis set out their interpretation
of the sequence, incorporating the evidence
of what is a diverse bunch of papers from
the rest of the volume, to give us an outline
of Moundville and its history. I particularly
like the use of the word ‘history’
— as opposed to, say, prehistory or
prehistoric sequence — as the authors
are clearly trying to move beyond outlining
a chronicle, towards presenting an explanatory
narrative.
To summarise briefly, the Moundville phase
was preceded by the West Jefferson phase
of the Woodland culture. An intensification
of both maize and craft production is in
evidence from around ad 900–1050. Late
in this period, the authors suspect, wealth
was being manipulated by community leaders
in competition with one another. This was
followed by the Moundville I phase. In early
phase I centralisation took place at a number
of sites in the Black Warrior Valley and
by late Moundville I, around ad 1200, the
paramount Moundville site complex was constructed
within a wooden palisade. After this period
of consolidation and entrenchment of the
paramountcy at Moundville the populace moved
away from Moundville to a number of secondary
mounded sites. The elite remained resident
at Moundville. Possible reasons for this
shift in settlement are a desire to increase
the sanctity of the centre by moving the
people out, soil depletion caused by the
concentration of people in one place during
phase I, a lessened threat of war, with
the palisade no longer kept up, or some
combination of these factors. At this time
Moundville seems to have become a necropolis
for the surrounding populace. This period
lasted from around ad 1300–1450, or
late phase II to early phase III. Late phase
III and phase IV, up until around ad 1650
show that the occupation and use of Moundville
rapidly declined, although secondary centres
continued to thrive for some time as the
centre became irrelevant. By around ad 1550,
with the advent of phase IV, the social
system seems to have collapsed, maize production
severely declined, and eventually the area
became a no-mans land between warring Choctaw
and proto-Creek peoples. Of particular note
in this history is a reversal of previous
notions of the Moundville sequence. Whereas
earlier researchers believed that Moundville
had grown slowly followed by a sudden collapse
in phase IV, Knight and Steponaitis present
evidence of the sudden establishment of
the site at its maximum extent, followed
by a gradual collapse.
In Chapter 2; Population Trends at Moundville,
Steponaitis outlines the internal settlement
evidence for the history outlined in the
previous chapter. Midden, indicating habitation,
is concentrated in phase I and early phase
II (mainly dated with reference to a well
documented ceramic typology), while burials
are concentrated in phases II and III. Steponaitis
discusses other possible explanations, but
the data are pretty clear and the argument
concise, so that one feels it must be largely
correct.
Chapter 3; Moundville as a Diagrammatic
Ceremonial Centre, by Vernon Knight, examines
the way the social order is reproduced in
the spatial patterns of the mounds. Despite
giving one section the title of "Subterfuges
in the Idiom of Spatial Form" this
chapter is mercifully free of references
to incomprehensible French social philosophers.
There is a single relevant reference to
Lévi-Strauss’ practical work on social
and spatial patternings, the essence of
which is that three-dimensional spatial
patterning may mask many important and subtle
aspects of multi-dimensional social patterns.
The built environment may lock social patterns
into place, but may also provide an arena
for resistance, or perhaps, given Moundville’s
late history, political irrelevance. This
is a central point to make, acknowledging
the limitations of this sort of analysis.
The spatial pattern of Moundville is very
regular. Larger residential mounds alternate
regularly with smaller burial mounds around
the periphery of a central plaza. South
to north the mounds are progressively larger
and contain more and higher status burials.
Thus at the height of its use as a residential
complex during phase I - assuming contemporaneity
of mound use, by no means proven - a regular
pattern of a noble residence accompanied
by a mortuary temple is evident, a pattern
often found in Mississippian cultures. Mound
use became less common from phase II onwards,
with mortuary temples falling entirely out
of use. Knight argues that this regular
pattern of layout and pairing of mounds
reproduces the ranked ordering of corporate
segments in Moundville society. He supports
this argument with an ethnographic analogy
from the spatial patterning of Chikasaw
camps when the Chikasaw, otherwise dispersed,
meet in council. He argues for a strong
cultural connection, despite the 700 years
separating Moundville I from the early twentieth
century Chikasaw, who were also a Mississippian
people. The original informant for the information
collected in 1904 was relating traditional
ceremony and myth, and the camp layout described,
though no longer practiced, seems to have
been a traditional though idealised memory.
Unfortunately the analogy is overworked
in that Knight goes out of his way to justify
its use when the relationship between Moundville
and Chikasaw peoples is not at all clear.
This is unnecessary because the analogy
adds little to our understanding of the
Moundville spatial layout. The attempt to
interpret intangibles on the basis of tangible
evidence alone will always be open to criticism.
Knight’s argument is simple and convincing,
and he demonstrates the kind of social
structure that could have given rise to
the visible spatial structure, but I feel
he hath protested too much in his justification
of the ethnographic analogy, which makes
him seem unsure of the validity of his claims.
I doubt that such claims may be either validated
or invalidated except insofar as they advance
a coherent overall model of Moundville history,
which these do.
The remaining chapters are more in the
nature of reports than the first three,
not surprising given their origin at a conference
session. Chapter 4; Domestic life on the
Northwest Riverbank at Moundville, by Margaret
Scarry, reports on recent extensive mitigation
excavation prior to erosion prevention work.
Previous research has focussed on structures
associated with rank and power, rather than
those associated with the day to day domestic
life of the majority of Moundville’s
residents. Most of the evidence uncovered
could be dated, on the basis of both radiocarbon
dating and ceramic types, to phase I. Two
phases of domestic architecture were uncovered,
simple rectangular structures ranging in
size form 13 to 35 square metres. A change
in settlement is documented in late phase
I with structures built behind the palisade,
as opposed to the more dispersed settlement
in early phase I. There was some evidence
of craft production involving mica, and
imported material commonly used in paraphernalia
associated with the southeast ceremonial
complex (and here again some background
would be welcome to the uninitiated).
Chapter 5; Of Time and the River: Perspectives
on Health during the Moundville Chiefdom,
by Mary Powell, and Chapter 6; Human Subsistence
at Moundville: The Stable-Isotope Data,
by Margaret Schoeninger and Mark Schurr,
are rather technical in nature, as their
titles suggest. Here scientific analyses
of skeletal material document an increasing
reliance on maize, until the collapse of
the Moundville polity when health seriously
declines and wild foods become important.
Treponematosis (yaws and syphilis, though
apparently not venereal syphilis) and tuberculosis
were apparent throughout all phases, but
became less common in later phases as a
more dispersed settlement pattern led to
a decreased likelihood of transmission and
minimisation of dietary stress. In phases
II and III the population was too low and
dispersed for the effective epidemic transmission
of Spanish introduced influenza and smallpox,
and it is suggested that the collapse of
the Moundville polity was not due to disease,
but more probably to internal factors such
as a decline in soil productivity.
As a casual outside observer, I have long
been under the impression that a wave of
introduced disease decimated Native American
populations prior to effective European
contact, and that the Mississippi chiefdoms
exemplified this, so that by the time of
de Soto’s famous expedition to the
region he encountered only the sad remnants
of a once thriving people. Unfortunately
Schoeninger and Schurr’s argument to
the contrary is seriously underdeveloped.
This is a pity, because its implications
would seem to be important. Knight and Steponaitis
(Chapter 1) also side-step the issue of
Spanish impacts on Moundville. This rather
reinforces the impression of Moundville
as an ‘island’ in isolation both
historically and geographically. Its antecedents
and final end are (in this volume) not well
described.
Only briefly, in the introduction to Chapter
7; Outlying Sites within the Moundville
Chiefdom, by Paul Welch, is Moundville’s
overall place in Mississippian culture described.
This chapter presents a summary of the archaeology
of sites outside the main Moundville site,
but attributable to the Moundville polity,
that is to say, where the people lived in
their dispersed settlement pattern during
phases II and III. It is only in the last
10 or 20 years that these sites have been
closely examined. The geographic limits
of the Moundville polity seem to have been
the floodplain of the Black Warrior River
from 25 km north to 15–35 km (it is
not currently clear) south of the main site.
Welch describes two types of site. Firstly
hamlets and farmsteads, of which the total
number and details of distribution are not
clear. A few such sites have been excavated,
yielding structures, pit features and burials.
Secondly there are the secondary mound sites
containing single mounds. By dating these
secondary sites Welch is able to document
changing settlement patterns, with a proliferation
of secondary mound sites through time as
the population became more dispersed and,
perhaps, power shifted from the centre to
the status lineages of the periphery. In
late phase III the population seems to have
become nucleated around the secondary mounds.
Chapter 8; The Oliver Site and Economic
Organisation, by Lauren Michals, examines
one of these outlying sites in some detail,
reporting on salvage excavation of a farmstead
at the northern extremity of the Moundville
chiefdom. Surprisingly there is no site
plan of the excavation, an unfortunate omission.
But, as Welch says, with only a minimal
knowledge of the hamlet/farmstead sites,
where it might be assumed the majority of
the people lived and worked, the details
of this scheme remain to be filled in.
Despite my initial reservations it should
be clear that there are many good points
to this volume. The early chapters at least
provide a fair overview of an interesting
and important site. Any researchers interested
in the archaeology of chiefdoms, or of social
stratification and social organisation,
will find a great deal of interest here.
While we must continue to wait for a comprehensive
overview of Moundville (with maps) this
volume gives us a good idea of the current
state of play.
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World
Archaeological Bulletin