The McKeithen site, in north-central Florida, is a well-known exemplar of the Weeden Island phenomenon in the southeastern United States during the Late Woodland period. The site, with three low mounds situated within a horseshoe-shaped midden, was originally excavated and reported in 1984 by Jerald Milanich and colleagues in McKeithen Weeden Island: The Culture of Northern Florida, A.D. 200–900. The slender volume under review here, by Prudence Rice, is a reinterpretation of the site based largely on previously published data.
Rice is an accomplished Mayanist. She was drawn to this project, seeing it as a way to reframe a southeastern North American topic that was similar in many ways to Early and Middle Preclassic Maya. She casts herself as an “outsider,” but if she is an outsider, she is one who had a ringside seat to the original work. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Rice had an adjacent office and lab space in the Florida State Museum where she interacted directly with all the original participants.
As to why such a reinterpretation is needed, it is worth noting that most of the original work was done under the auspices of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant written in 1975, at the height of processualism in American archaeology. At that time, NSF favored testing materialist hypotheses emphasizing subsistence, economy, demography, and social evolution. It was almost unheard of to invoke religious beliefs and ritual as causal mechanisms having much, if any, importance.
Thus, Milanich and colleagues interpreted McKeithen, a pre-agricultural and pre-Mississippian village, in socio-structural and demographic terms. Population growth led to kin-based fissioning and the formation of smaller outlying communities with new mounds serving local lineages. McKeithen was precocious, having several features, such as potentially ranked kin groups, incipient specialization, multiple platform mounds, and a plaza, that would become standard later in Mississippian times. It was a blip on an evolutionary path leading to chiefdom complexity.
Rice’s reinterpretation embraces neo-evolutionary terms, freely using “tribe” and “chiefdom” but tending to prefer the rough synonyms of early Neolithic or Formative as comparative developmental concepts. Like the original, this book is about emergent complexity but with a much different emphasis on causality. Here, ideology and religious belief systems have properties that play strongly into the emergence of sedentary life and social inequality.
A recurrent idea in the book is that the transition to sedentary life among hunter-gatherers entails stresses that are resolved through ideological restructuring. This restructuring is codified and routinized in the context of new institutions with novel forms of community leadership. In this vein, Rice recasts the Weeden Island phenomenon as an integrated ritual network materialized as a ceramic sphere, in which ritual rather than political hierarchies prevailed.
Rice uses costly signaling theory to examine two outstanding features of McKeithen Weeden Island: mound building and the use of pottery animal effigies in mortuary ritual. Costly signaling theory posits that persons having the means to do so send positive signals that communicate their strength and power. Such signals are “costly” because they are expensive in resources and labor.
For Rice, mound building was a key component of ideological restructuring, one that incorporated world-renewal ceremonialism. The mounds communicated power and permanence, a claim to the setting and a repository for the remains of its ancestors. Because only a subset of the community was buried in Mound C, the site’s burial mound, Rice interprets that mound as memorializing a high-ranking lineage, a sign of social differentiation.
Mortuary pottery was specially made in the form of animal effigies, mostly birds. Using petrography and neutron activation analysis, Rice shows that its manufacture was dispersed among widespread Weeden Island communities. In this model, these effigies were created by quasi-specialists, perhaps as part of a secret society devoted to funerary practices. She interprets the effigies as shamanic spirit companions accompanying souls in their flight to the otherworld.
Finally, Rice casts McKeithen as manifesting a religious enclave of immigrants from the Gulf Coast who sought a separate religious identity from their Gulf Coast forebears. It is an example of religious schismogenesis.
The book includes new data, prominently including documentation of a circular enclosure surrounding the site detected by lidar. A lone interment on the summit of Mound B is reinterpreted as a nonlocal female, killed and buried at a time possibly postdating Weeden Island.
I recommend the book to those whose interests include the origins of inequality. It is a refreshing take on a southeastern North American topic that needed reworking. Each introduced concept is explored in abstract, theoretical terms including key citations. The writing is comfortably accessible.
