Janet Rafferty

The Archaeological Record on Sedentariness: Recognition, Development, and Implications

Publisher Summary The development of sedentariness marks an important change in the evolutionary potential of a cultural tradition. In certain situations, it caused or allowed more rapid population growth, the development of higher levels of political organization, and the development of agriculture. Each of these in turn had important repercussions, with all three ultimately playing roles in the independent advent of the state and civilization in several areas of the world. This chapter discusses how and why sedentariness developed, how it can be recognized archaeologically, and why it failed to trigger the cultural changes that led to greater complexity, in some cases, whereas it provided the crucial foundation for such changes in others.

Determining Duration at Prehistoric Sites: Short-Term Sedentary Settlement at Josey Farm NE Mississippi

Abstract Frequency and duration of site use can be studied through analysis of artifact clusters and by using careful chronological arguments. Four occupations were discerned at the Josey Farm site (220k793) in Oktibbeha County, NE Mississippi: Late Archaic, Middle Mississippian, and early and late Protohistoric periods, ranging in date from 1000 B.C. to A.C. 1650. Two of these represent small, short-term sedentary habitation such as seen elsewhere on upland ridges in the area, beginning in Middle Woodland and continuing through the Protohistoric period. Dispersed sedentary settlement patterns form an important part of the record of change in landscape use in many parts of the world. A suite of detailed spatial and chronological analyses allow such phenomena to be discerned and their variability documented.

Cooking Pots as Burial Urns

Abstract Large ceramic vessels used as burial urns occasionally have been found in Late Mississippian/protohistoric contexts in Alabama and Mississippi. Ethnohistorical documents suggest that large vessels were used for cooking in a domestic context. A systematic examination of three urns from east-central Mississippi shows multiple uses prior to their final deposition with burials. Vessel size analysis of a temporal sequence of sherds from midden contexts used sherd thickness and curvature data to show that large vessels became more common. Three explanations are examined to better understand the use of large vessels during this time: bet hedging, costly signaling, and changing technology. The results confirm the use of burial urns in domestic contexts before their final use as interment containers, making technological change the most viable of the three hypotheses.

Reverse Engineering Stone Atlatl Dart Points

ABSTRACT Reverse engineering provides a way, in the absence of contemporary documentation, to deduce from physical principles the functional traits of artifacts. Constraints on atlatl dart point design serve as the principles to explain the discard of 46 whole points at the Cork site, 22OK746, a Middle Woodland occupation in north-central Mississippi. Because many of the points likely were jam-hafted, the dart–arrow index of Hildebrandt and King, rather than shoulder width, was used to identify them as dart points. Constraints operating on accuracy, penetrability, and durability were chosen. They include weight, symmetry, tip angle, raw material, and ratios of width and length to thickness. Cork site points most often violate critical values of the two ratios, indicating that their poor ability to penetrate a target was a major factor in their discard.

Sourcing galena from a Middle Woodland habitation site in northeast Mississippi

ABSTRACT Galena has been recovered mostly in mortuary contexts – burial mounds, burial caves, and associated mortuary facilities – from Middle Woodland sites in the Southeast. Three small pieces of galena from the Cork site (22OK746) in northeast Mississippi came from midden deposits at a site with no mound or burials. Lead isotope analysis was used to source the samples to the Central Missouri-Tri-State-North Arkansas region. Isotopes provide an excellent sourcing method because their ratios are stable and large comparative source datasets are available. Recovery bias may have led to underestimation of galena presence in Middle Woodland habitation sites.