Jay K. Johnson

Watson Brake, a Middle Archaic mound complex in northeast Louisiana

Middle Archaic earthen mound complexes in the lower Mississippi valley are remote antecedents of the famous but much younger Poverty Point earthworks. Watson Brake is the largest and most complex of these early mound sites. Very extensive coring and stratigraphic studies, aided by 25 radiocarbon dates and six luminescence dates, show that minor earthworks were begun here at ca. 3500 B.C. in association with an oval arrangement of burned rock middens at the edge of a stream terrace. The full extent of the first earthworks is not yet known. Substantial moundraising began ca. 3350 B.C. and continued in stages until some time after 3000 B.C. when the site was abandoned. All 11 mounds and their connecting ridges were occupied between building bursts. Soils formed on some of these temporary surfaces, while lithics, fire-cracked rock, and fired clay/loam objects became scattered throughout the mound fills. Faunal and floral remains from a basal midden indicate all-season occupation, supported by broad-spectrum foraging centered on nuts, fish, and deer. All the overlying fills are so acidic that organics have not survived. The area enclosed by the mounds was kept clean of debris, suggesting its use as ritual space. The reasons why such elaborate activities first occurred here remain elusive. However, some building bursts covary with very well-documented increases in El Niño/Southern Oscillation events. During such rapid increases in ENSO frequencies, rainfall becomes extremely erratic and unpredictable. It may be that early moundraising was a communal response to new stresses of droughts and flooding that created a suddenly more unpredictable food base.

Stone Tools, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century Chickasaw in Northeast Mississippi

The technological analysis of a collection of cores, flakes, unifaces, and bifaces from a Chickasaw site in northeast Mississippi makes it clear that the lithic industry was substantially reorganized to meet the functional demands of the early eighteenth-century colonial economy. The focus of this industry was a distinctive, well-made end scraper. Similar tools occur throughout the Midwest during late prehistoric times and extend into the middle Mississippi River valley during the protohistoric. Although the Midwest scrapers are likely a response to the spread of bison into that region, a study of the distribution of the Chickasaw tool kit in time and space suggests that it was used to process deer skins, the primary focus of the trade with the French and English in the Southeast. However, stone scrapers are not found on all early eighteenth-century Chickasaw sites. The historical documents suggest that some villages were more successful in their trade relations with the Europeans and were therefore able to replace stone tools with metal at an earlier date. An examination of the occurrence of stone tools throughout the Southeast during the early historic period indicates that relative distance to ports of trade was the primary determinant of the rate at which stone-tool technology was abandoned.

The Development of Southeastern Archaeology

Ten scholars with specialities ranging from ethno-history to remote sensing and lithic analysis to bio-archaeology chronicle the changes in the way prehistory in the South-east has been studied since the 19th century. Each brings to the task the particular perspective provided by his or her own subdiscipline. The result is a multifaceted overview of the history of archaeology in a region that has played an important but variable role in the overall development of North American archaeology. Some of the specialities discussed in this book were traditionally relegated to appendices or ignored completely in site reports that are more than 20 years old. Today, most are part of the bodies of the reports but this integration has been hard won. Others have been, and will continue to be, of central concern to archaeologists. Whatever the case, each chapter details the way in which changes in method can be related to changes in theory by reviewing major landmarks in the literature. As a consequence, the reader can compare the development of each of the subdisciplines, which is not always uniform. Also, each chapter provides access to a different aspect of the rich literature on south-eastern prehistory. The book should be valuable to south-eastern archaeologists. Because many of the major figures in American archaeology have worked in the south-east, the book also provides important insights for archaeologists everywhere. The general reader should find the book of interest because the development of Southeastern archaeology reflects trends in the development of social science as a whole.