This volume, which is coedited by Robert A. Cook and Aaron R. Comstock and includes 34 contributors, necessarily complicates our understanding of the spread of Mississippianism as an interplay between social and environmental factors. The editors have cleverly assembled 13 chapters that paint an expanded picture of the broad impacts of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) on the development of Mississippian societies in the midwestern and southeastern United States, the migration of people to and from population centers, and the ultimate decline, as archaeologically defined, of Mississippian culture. Following the Mississippian Spread will prove exciting and useful to any readers interested in the archaeology of migration processes within agricultural societies and will inspire new theoretical interpretations and avenues of inquiry.
Contributors to this volume deftly combine climate science and archaeology to explore migration and the diverse responses of Indigenous people to climate change at multiple scales throughout the Mississippian world. They present regional climate reconstructions employing isotopic analysis, geological measurement of relative rainfall and flooding activity, and tree-ring data; and they examine migration and demographics through isotopic analysis of ancestral human remains, biodistance studies, and population estimates through various methods. Taken together, one is astounded by the vastness of the networks, migrations, materials, and ideas that came to represent the Mississippian phenomenon captured in this volume’s pages.
Comstock et alia’s introduction (chapter 1) outlines the global pattern of the “push” of human populations out of areas of climate stress and the “pull” into areas with ameliorative environmental conditions throughout the Holocene, positioning migration as an adaptive strategy. Organized by geographic region, the volume’s chapters explore this theme along somewhat of a spectrum—certainly not a dichotomy—of environmental to social push/pull factors. Sissel Schroeder et alia (chapter 3), Jeremy J. Wilson and Broxton W. Bird (chapter 4), and Cook and Comstock (chapter 7) present compelling correlations between environment and migration, warfare, and shifts in subsistence and settlement patterns.
Lynne P. Sullivan et alia (chapter 8), Stefan Brannan (chapter 10), and Jayur Madhusudan Mehta and Christopher B. Rodning (chapter 12) discuss how climatic events fit into a broader pattern of population movements and sociopolitical interactions throughout the Mississippian trajectory in their study regions. In their chapter, Mehta and Rodning make an intriguing link between flooding events and both mound-building and world renewal ceremonialism in the Lower Mississippi valley.
At the other end of the spectrum, Kristin M. Hedman et alia (chapter 2), Thomas E. Emerson et alia (chapter 5), and Thomas J. Zych and John D. Richards (chapter 6) each present strong cases that the movement of Mississippian people was driven more by social factors. Of particular note is Hedman et alia’s focus on the technological advances of Indigenous farmers, alongside MCA precipitation, to intensify agricultural production.
The remaining chapters explore the Mississippian spread in novel ways. Brandon T. Richison and David G. Anderson (chapter 9) synthesize an impressive amount of data to offer a broader look at the timing, scale, and social impacts of Mississippian population movements throughout the eastern United States, and Dorian J. Burnette et alia (chapter 11) discuss the significance of climate in Mississippian ritual practices in the Lower Mississippi Valley.
In his discussant chapter, Charles R. Cobb (chapter 13) points out a theoretical gap in the volume and suggests that the authors explore a relational framework he defines as “political climatology.” Although I acknowledge that theory building was not a goal of this volume, most authors fall short of highlighting the agency of the Indigenous people they say “adapted” to the changing climate and “abandoned” their towns and villages. With Burnette et alia, Hedman et alia, and Mehta and Rodning as notable exceptions, there is little discussion of the planning, decision-making, and strategy that community members and leaders employed to ensure that their people thrived along with the changing environment. For example, the Angel Mounds site in the Lower Ohio River Valley was similarly depopulated during the LIA, but this was only after 200 years of people living through catastrophic drought and warfare and then intentionally closing the site’s mounds with a meter-thick layer of clay before leaving. This end to the Angel Mounds occupational history is not a rapid abandonment; instead, it is a process spanning eight generations by which a challenged but thriving community eventually decided to move away from this place but marked the landscape for future generations.
It is a challenge—yet an imperative in archaeology and anthropology more broadly—not to distance our work too much from the people about whom we seek to learn. Accordingly, Following the Mississippian Spread reminds those more relationally minded scholars not to overlook the ways in which people are intrinsically and meaningfully linked to the landscape, and it lays robust foundations for attaining deeper and more nuanced understandings of the people we call Mississippian.
