In her opening to Chapter 4 of Life in a Mississippian Warscape, Meghan Buchanan takes inspiration from anthropologist Kathleen Stewart's observation that the seemingly mundane things and happenings of our everyday lives are always connected to things and happenings elsewhere in the world. Buchanan engages this notion throughout her book to offer community-focused insights on warfare and regional upheaval from the vantage point of Common Field, a large Mississippian village (ca. AD 1250–early 1300s) in southeast Missouri. The introductory chapter summarizes contemporary anthropological theories of warfare, foregrounding the lives of everyday people but always acknowledging the reflexive relationship between microscale and macroscale processes. Chapter 1 whittles down these broader theories into a set of core concepts—including hybridity and “escape agriculture” (planning for food and basic necessities)—as she sets up a more focused approach to understanding the challenges of life in a late precontact warscape at this particular time and place.
In Chapter 2, Buchanan contrasts evolutionary perspectives with “historical-processual” perspectives on Mississippian warfare and situates warfare as a politico-spiritual endeavor. Although the goal of her work is to illuminate the proximate lived experiences (rather than the ultimate causes) of warfare, Buchanan characterizes the late Mississippian and protohistoric world as a landscape of large-scale abandonments, conflagrations, migrations, and droughts as a context for understanding diverse motivations and tactics of warfare during this period. Chapter 3 begins with a regional culture history and provides a historical overview of work at the Common Field site itself, tying its basic historical sequence into regional trends such as the rise and fall of Cahokia and the Vacant Quarter phenomenon, referring to movements away from several areas of Mississippian settlement during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Buchanan opens Chapter 4 by hypothesizing the archaeological appearance of warfare-related “risk aversion” at both the micro- and macroscale, emphasizing ceramics and fauna as they relate to subsistence practices. She outlines and justifies her operating assumptions—that hunters in risk-averse situations are more likely to hunt alone rather than in groups, and that risk-averse people may be more likely to focus on making traditional ceramic forms. She argues that we might also expect to see evidence for feasting and novel religious practices, which at first seems difficult to reconcile with her previous assertion of conservative ceramics practices. Buchanan follows this up with significant amounts of ceramic and faunal data. She notes lower-than-expected occurrences of fish and low-yield deer parts, which she interprets as a risk mitigation strategy. Bowls and plates are overrepresented in the ceramic assemblage, suggesting an emphasis on serving and feasting. Buchanan provides detailed and comparative descriptions of plate construction and decorative motifs.
Chapters 5 and 6 comprise the crux of Buchanan's interpretation of the ceramic and zooarchaeological patterns at the site. Her goal is to prioritize relationships “between people, materials, and experiences within [a] particular social context” (p. 110) and, secondarily, to illuminate linkages between local and regional phenomena. She suggests that the high proportion of vessels made with shell-tempered grog reflects purposeful decisions to recycle pottery into temper, thereby minimizing the risk of ambush involved in journeying to the Mississippi to acquire mussels. This melds with her interpretation of faunal assemblages reflecting a paucity of riverine resources, given that acquisition of such resources would be inherently riskier in a warscape compared to hunting terrestrial animals in close proximity to the village. However, lest one think that Buchanan portrays residents of Common Field as cowering victims hiding in their village, Buchanan also points to ample evidence for extraction of ritual resources from a broader sacred landscape—apparently, the draw of these critical resources was strong enough to outweigh the risk of venturing out. She further illuminates the creativity of Common Field residents in her extended discussion of local plate decoration as a novel take on Mississippian Above World themes. She sees their form as reflecting feasting and group-oriented ritual practice, further enfolding ceramic practices into the broader warscape at this time and place. This argument in particular leans into her interesting application of the concept of hybridity—not hybridity of traditions but rather the hybridization of people's ceramic habitus with their changing social circumstances.
This book represents an important contribution to the archaeological literature on warfare and should appeal to scholars, regardless of regional and temporal interests, for its theoretical content alone. Buchanan's analyses and interpretations in and of themselves are noteworthy, filling a regional gap in the Mississippian literature. It also opens doors for further inquiry about this critical time and place in the Mississippian world. Buchanan's work welcomes an incorporation of explicitly geographic perspectives—her emphasis on warscapes and mention of deathscapes and the new “spatialities” of warfare lead one to consider the other kinds of overlapping spatial/placial-scapes that comprise life. An age-focused and a more clearly gender-focused perspective would contribute to a more complete picture of everyday life in a warscape, particularly insofar as interrogating traditional views of the gendered taskscape (e.g., ceramic production, food preparation, hunting, warriorhood). These are not criticisms as much as they are an acknowledgment of opportunities for further inquiry.
Buchanan's work provides a data- and theory-driven look at an important and understudied region in the Mississippian literature. Although it is purposefully and effectively focused on the consequences of warfare on daily lives of ordinary Mississippians, it also provides a much needed and long-overdue synthesis of relevant archaeological background in southeastern Missouri.
