Jon Muller

Mississippian Specialization and Salt

Despite a tendency to treat Mississippian production as involving specialization, little effort has been made to test these proposals in actual field work. A distinction between specialization at a site and specialization of producers is made in this article and applied to materials from the Great Salt Spring, a Mississippian salt production site in southern Illinois. Testing and excavations in 1981 and 1982 show that this was a true limited activity site. Nonetheless, the data on producer organization do not strongly support the conclusion of specialist production there and are consistent with simpler models of non-specialist production.

The Kincaid System: Mississippian Settlement in the Environs of a Large Site

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the Mississippian settlement in the environs of a large site or the Kincaid system. The Kincaid locality has been an area of archaeological interest for some time. The major source on the University of Chicago work in the Black Bottom during the 1930s is Kincaid, a Prehistoric Illinois Metropolis by Fay–Cooper Cole and others. Preliminary reports on Southern Illinois Universitys work are in press by the Illinois Archaeological Survey. Berle Clay also has discussed the archaeology of the area. The initial survey of the Black Bottom began with a transect from the terrace down into the bottomland in the northern portion of the flood-plain. This area was chosen because a number of different habitats were represented and because the area had mostly been in forest or otherwise unavailable for walkover at the time of the University of Chicagos work. Moreover, several different ways of looking at the population and labor requirements in the Black Bottom locality all agree on the approximate maximum of population. The population of the Black Bottom was, in fact, probably lower than these estimates.

Pans and a Grain of Salt: Mississippian Specialization Revisited

Yerkess comments fail to place my article in its context of other research on the lower Ohio Valley. He reacts more to what he thinks I believe than to what I actually wrote. Yerkes seems to want to identify Mississippian specialization on the basis of artifact traits rather than on the basis of actual organization ofproduction. Moreover, he does not present any additional significant evidence to support the idea that true specialization was present in Mississippian society, in the American Bottom or elsewhere. The need to reject lower-level explanations of data before proposing higher-level explanations is not sufficiently appreciated. Finally, there is not sufficient appreciation of the degree of importance of the concept of specialization to the investigation of the social evolution of hierarchical systems.