Signs of Power: The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817313915 ISBN 13: 9780817313913

Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Traces the sources of power and large-scale organization of prehistoric peoples among Archaic societies.

By focusing on the first instances of mound building, pottery making, fancy polished stone and bone, as well as specialized chipped stone, artifacts, and their widespread exchange, this book explores the sources of power and organization among Archaic societies. It investigates the origins of these technologies and their effects on long-term (evolutionary) and short-term (historical) change.

The characteristics of first origins in social complexity belong to 5,000- to 6,000-year-old Archaic groups who inhabited the southeastern United States. In Signs of Power, regional specialists identify the conditions, causes, and consequences that define organization and social complexity in societies. Often termed "big mound power," these considerations include the role of demography, kinship, and ecology in sociocultural change; the meaning of geometry and design in sacred groupings; the degree of advancement in stone tool technologies; and differentials in shell ring sizes that reflect social inequality.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jon L. Gibson is Professor (Retired) of Anthropology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and author of The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point.  


Philip J. Carr is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Alabama and editor of The Organization of North American Prehistoric Chipped Stone Tool Technologies.

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Signs of Power

The Rise of Cultural Complexity in the Southeast

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1391-3

Contents

Figures...................................................................................................................................................................................................................viiTables....................................................................................................................................................................................................................xiPreface and Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................................................xiii1. Big Mounds, Big Rings, Big Power Jon L. Gibson and Philip J. Carr.....................................................................................................................................................12. Late Archaic Fisher-Foragers in the Apalachicola-Lower Chattahoochee Valley, Northwest Florida-South Georgia/Alabama Nancy Marie White................................................................................103. Measuring Shell Rings for Social Inequality Michael Russo.............................................................................................................................................................264. Regional-Scale Interaction Networks and the Emergence of Cultural Complexity along the Northern Margins of the Southeast Richard W. Jefferies.........................................................................715. The Green River in Comparison to the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Archaic: To Build Mounds or Not to Build Mounds? George M. Crothers..........................................................................866. Cultural Complexity in the Middle Archaic of Mississippi Samuel O. Brookes............................................................................................................................................977. The Burkett Site (23MI20): Implications for Cultural Complexity and Origins Prentice M. Thomas, Jr., L. Janice Campbell, and James R. Morehead........................................................................1148. Poverty Point Chipped-Stone Tool Raw Materials: Inferring Social and Economic Strategies Philip J. Carr and Lee H. Stewart............................................................................................1299. Are We Fixing to Make the Same Mistake Again? Joe Saunders............................................................................................................................................................14610. Surrounding the Sacred: Geometry and Design of Early Mound Groups as Meaning and Function John E. Clark..............................................................................................................16211. Crossing the Symbolic Rubicon in the Southeast Kenneth E. Sassaman and Michael J. Heckenberger.......................................................................................................................21412. Explaining Sociopolitical Complexity in the Foraging Adaptations of the Southeastern United States: The Roles of Demography, Kinship, and Ecology in Sociocultural Evolution Randolph J. Widmer.....................23413. The Power of Beneficent Obligation in First Mound-Building Societies Jon L. Gibson...................................................................................................................................25414. Archaic Mounds and the Archaeology of Southeastern Tribal Societies David G. Anderson................................................................................................................................27015. Old Mounds, Ancient Hunter-Gatherers, and Modern Archaeologists George R. Milner.....................................................................................................................................300References Cited..........................................................................................................................................................................................................317Contributors..............................................................................................................................................................................................................365Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................369

Chapter One

Big Mounds, Big Rings, Big Power Jon L. Gibson and Philip J. Carr

The ancient monuments ... consist ... of elevations and embankments of earth and stone, erected with great labor and manifest design. Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848)

Mounds have quickened the pulse of American antiquarians and archaeologists for generations. They still do. Who among you could stay calm after hacking a trail through a bottomland-hardwood jungle and suddenly realizing that the incline you're struggling to climb is no natural levee but a lost Indian mound? Or stand atop a mound on a starlit night with a handful of fellow archaeologists and keep from getting caught up in what the wind is whispering or help wondering whether the owl hooting deep in the woods is bird or shilombish? No use pretending, mounds are as magical today as ever. The contributors to this book are come before you to explain some of that magic.

ANCIENT MOUNDS AND THEIR BUILDERS

Mound builders always have been considered culturally more sophisticated and evolutionarily more advanced than groups who did not build mounds. But were they really? What about builders of the very first Archaic mounds? Were they more socially and politically adept than their hunter-gatherer forefathers and neighbors or just different? Archaeologists labored long under sway of hunter-gatherers as short-lived brutes spending every waking moment filling their bellies (Hobbes 1968 [1651]) or as lay ecologists basking in the leisure afforded by an almost serendipitous affluence (Sahlins 1968a, 1972). Ethnographically known hunter-gatherers did not engage in public construction, and only in rare prehistoric instances, such as Poverty Point in the Lower Mississippi Valley and shell rings on the southern Atlantic coast, were Archaic hunter-gatherers accorded mound-building motives and skills. Still, such primal cases were considered atypical, ahistorical-as cases lying outside mainstream cultural developments and forming exceptions to widely accepted generalizations of Archaic lifeways in the southeastern United States. Archaeologists were taken with the generalized foraging model of egalitarian hunter-gatherers going about their business in an efficient, no-nonsense way-so much so, in fact, that they skipped over the fact that the model was based on historically marginalized foragers, not on pristine foragers living in bountiful environments.

The issue of social complexity drives authors' searches here just as it did two centuries ago when antiquarians were trying to explain the enigma of the mounds and their builders. But there is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817313915
• ISBN 13: 9780817313913
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Herausgeber: Gibson Jon L.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande