As both the introductory (Wilson & Sullivan) and concluding (Anderson) chapters of Mississippian Beginnings note, this volume is the first major statement on Mississippian origins since Bruce Smith's (Reference Smith1990) The Mississippian Emergence was published almost 30 years ago. In addition to a change in terminology—from emergence to beginnings—the current volume describes a fundamental transformation in how archaeologists think about Mississippian beginnings.
Smith's earlier volume framed the question of Mississippian emergence in terms of a debate between analogic and homological explanations: did Mississippian societies emerge in different places across the American southeast independently in response to similar ecological conditions, or did they originate in a core heartland and radiate outwards, via processes of migration and diffusion? While Smith offered the possibility of a theoretical middle ground between these two viewpoints, the contributors to that volume largely came down on the side of analogy, emphasizing environment and ecology, local origins, isolation and independence—the stuff of processual interpretations of the time. This same core opposition—analogy/homology—still underscores the current volume, though the theoretical terrain has shifted, with most contributors now coming down on the homology side of the debate, emphasizing historical processes of migration, pilgrimage, entanglement and hybridization.
Despite the shift in theoretical perspective, like Smith's earlier volume, this one also does not seek to identify or provide a sweeping explanation for Mississippian origins (Smith Reference Smith and Smith2007, xxi). Though many of the current authors acknowledge what has come to be called the Cahokian ‘big bang’ and look towards the American Bottom as a source for much of what became Mississippian, the contributors emphasize cultural pluralism, difference and the historical contingence and particularity of each region. Wilson and Sullivan (ch. 1) also echo Smith's description for the study of Mississippianism as a process of unpacking a series of nested ‘black boxes’. Indeed, the volume continues that process—continuing to unpack the Mississippian ‘black boxes’ of a number of regions.
In addition to the introductory and concluding chapters, this volume includes eight additional chapters of varying scope. The second chapter of the volume, by Vanderwarker, Bardolph and Scarry, is the most extensive in regional coverage, considering and synthesizing the role of maize in Mississippian beginnings in the American Bottom, the Illinois River Valley, the Central Mississippi Valley, the Lower Mississippi Valley, the Black Warrior Valley and northern Georgia. This broad-scale, comparative perspective is unique to the volume and allows the authors to conclude that the role (and timing) of maize was highly varied among regions. They note that in some regions it was the intensification of non-maize plant foods (starchy seeds) that actually first preceded the consolidation of regional political hierarchies, and that only in the Black Warrior Valley of Alabama can maize intensification be directly linked to political development.
Of the remaining seven case studies, three chapters in the volume are regional studies that investigate Mississippian beginnings in regions traditionally associated with the Mississippian phenomenon: the American Bottom (Betzenhauser, ch. 3), the Illinois River Valleys (Wilson, Delaney & Millhouse, ch. 4) and the Fort Walton Region (Du Vernay & White, ch. 9). Betzenhauser provides a good analysis of the transition from Late Woodland to Mississippian lifeways in the Cahokia region by investigating changes in site location (via site-file data), examining changes in architecture and site layout and distributions of local and non-local pottery and stone. Wilson, Delaney and Millhouse use ceramic data to suggest direct interactions between small numbers of Cahokians and populations located to the north in the Illinois and Apple River Valleys. Du Vernay and White argue that Fort Walton was largely an in situ development—characterized by a persistence of non-shell tempers and check-stamped pottery.
Two additional chapters, those by Boudreaux (ch. 7) and King, Thurnock and Stephenson (ch. 8) are distinguished by having a focus primarily on single Mississippian sites: Town Creek in the North Carolina piedmont and the Hollywood Site on the Middle Savannah River, respectively. The latter is a stand-out chapter in the volume, mixing legacy data (excavated in the nineteenth century) with an intriguing analysis of the structured deposition of Mound B as a recreation of the cosmos that intentionally positioned local and non-local objects in juxtaposition.
The final two case-studies consider Caddoan (Regnier, ch. 6) and Fort Ancient (Cook, ch. 5) beginnings, cultures often considered somewhat peripheral to the core Mississippian phenomena. Both chapters, however, stress the interactions between peoples of these regions and non-local Mississippians as central to cultural development. Regnier examines the pottery assemblages from a suite of Late Woodland and Formative Caddo sites in the Middle Red River Drainage, and suggests that much of Early Caddo practices emerged prior to major Mississippian interactions, with only a later, more limited, incorporation of many classic Mississippian traits.
In chapter 5, Cook summarizes a considerable number of lines of evidence that he utilizes in his consideration of Fort Ancient/Mississippian interactions, including new radiocarbon dates, strontium analysis and biodistance studies. Cook concludes that ‘Mississippian interactions and movements were entangled with Fort Ancient origins and development in complex ways’ (p. 165) and notably occurred at the very beginning of the Fort Ancient period, rather than later in time. This chapter is unique in the volume in that Cook seeks a middle ground, or synthesis between history and process (his words), or, as framed in The Mississippian Emergence, between homology and analogy. This attempt at synthesis is laudable, but in some ways I think this ambitious chapter perhaps tries to do too much in too little space. There are several unnecessary digressions, some topics are introduced and never further pursued, and the attempted theoretical synthesis seems incomplete.
The volume concludes with a chapter by David Anderson that synthesizes many of the new developments in Mississippian archaeology since Smith's volume first emerged. This is an excellent summary, and one which also serves to tie together the diverse case studies found in the volume. Each chapter in this volume does important work unpacking a regional ‘black box’ using current theoretical perspectives. Overall, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on Mississippian societies, and as a statement on Mississippian beginnings it is a worthy follow-up to Smith's earlier volume.
