I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the use of modern technology to revisit basic, and often recently‐unexamined, concepts in archaeology, and also about the archaeology of identity, specifically cultural identity. As has often happened over the thirty‐plus years of my association with the Wickliffe site, these musings have forced me to reconsider previous ideas.
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The Wickliffe site is a Mississippian mound center and village in Ballard County, overlooking the Mississippi River. This is the earliest map we have, published by Robert Loughridge in 1888, showing a set of mounds around a central plaza, with my annotations in red. I’ve proposed a tripartite chronology to subdivide the occupation, overall dated to AD 1100‐1350.
A couple of years ago, I played with mapping the distribution of ceramic wares and types across the site. I found that, in the Middle Wickliffe period, serving wares concentrated in the area between Mounds B and C. Mound C is where the cemetery is located, which is primarily a Middle Wickliffe burial deposit. Mound B is a residential mound, which I interpret as the chief’s residence. I’m aware of the baggage that the term “chief” carries, but it’s quicker than saying “the gender‐
unspecified head of the household that lived on top of the mound,” so I keep using the short word. It seems significant to me that the high proportion of serving wares concentrates between these mounds in the Middle Wickliffe period, and I designated this area the “chief’s yard”, the area in which the chief hosted activities such as feasts, festivals, and tailgate parties before the home chunkey games. In the Late Wickliffe period, loci of high serving‐ware ratios spread all over the site, suggesting that the higher‐status ceramics and associated foodways diffused throughout the community.
One critic of this formulation said that I needed to look at distributions of ornaments and other elite items before I could make a case for a chief’s yard. So, 2
despite small sample sizes, I did. 2
Here is the distribution of beads and discs and discoidals in the Early Wickliffe period. They tend to be in the north, but with no particular pattern.
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In the Middle Wickliffe period, there is a pretty clear concentration of ornaments and disc/discoidals in the proposed chief’s yard area. I also added the purple cross to mark the location of a marine shell spider gorget.
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In the Late Wickliffe period, ornaments and discs/discoidals diffused across the site. I submit that these distributions support my interpretation of the ceramics, that an area associated with chiefly hosted activities was located between Mounds B and C in the Middle Wickliffe period. For a number of reasons, I question whether there was a chief in residence at Wickliffe during the Late period. In my chief’s yard scenario, I suggested that the dispersion of activities and artifacts associated with the elite presence in the Middle period throughout the site in the Late period indicates a relaxation of central control by the chief, perhaps because of the absence of a chief.
What neither I nor anyone else questioned is why others in the community should take up elite activities and artifact markers in the absence of a chief. This is because, being good capitalists all, I and my audiences accepted the notion of upward mobility as a given. But in a ranked society, commoners do not aspire to be chiefs. They’re probably just happy when a chief goes away and leaves them alone.
I think it’s too simple to say that items that concentrate in an arguably elite‐
associated location are necessarily elite items. They may have been markers of Mississippian identity.
I posit that chief’s yard was the area in which in which the elite demonstrated the foodways, personal adornments and activities of Mississippian identity. In the Late Wickliffe period, these behaviors were absorbed and adopted throughout the village. The Late Wickliffe distribution implies clearly that high serving vessel ratios 5
and special artifacts are not confined to the elite, but were markers of a more widely‐
integrated Mississippian identity. What we see is less the concentration and then relaxation of elite authority than the process of Mississippianization, of the demonstration and adoption of Mississippian cultural identity.
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So, what was Mississippian culture? Most of us, when we introduce Mississippian culture, use a map something like this. We define Mississippian by three main characteristics: platform mounds, corn agriculture, and shell‐tempered ceramics. This works fine for a general audience or an introductory archaeology class, but actually it’s a truly lousy way to define Mississippian, and it does not at all explain the red line on the map. Corn was farmed pretty much wherever corn could produce a productive crop in the late prehistoric period. Shell temper spread up the Ohio Valley, across the Alleghenies, and through the Middle Atlantic region in the late prehistoric period, and that doesn’t even take into account the Middle Woodland shell‐ tempered wares of the Chesapeake.
We have to remember that the standard definition of Mississippian was created to distinguish Mississippian from the Woodland culture or cultures that also occupied the Midwest and Mid‐South, as it turned out, before the Mississippian culture. It was not a definition designed to define the spatial parameters of Mississippian culture.
What this map intends to encompass is the area of the platform mounds. More broadly, it defines the area of the symbolic community of the Mississippian Art and Ceremonial Complex. To me, the map therefore represents a broad iconographic community, with emphasis on the idea of community. I speculate about the nature and self‐awareness of such a community: was there actually, at some level, a sense of Mississippian identity?
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The archaeological culture is the analog to the ethnographic culture area, as developed in the early 20th century by the works of Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber for North American anthropology, and by Carl Sauer for regional geography. Wissler, in 1923, referred to a “culture type” as a classification according to “trait‐
complexes,” and wrote that “the culture type has its geography.” Although originally an area of theory in cultural anthropology, the culture area concept became primarily an organizational device. Yet, in theory, the culture area defines a broad community of some kind.
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In thinking about the broad Mississippian community, I embarked on an attempt to map Mississippian mound sites. Getting the data from state site files has not been easy, and I appreciate those site file administrators who shared their data. In this map, the blue sites come from site file data, and the red sites I drew from the literature and general knowledge. I am sure that the red‐dot states, especially Illinois, offer very incomplete pictures.
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I actually prefer this version, without state boundaries. I don’t have time here to detail all the problems with site form data, but I think this is the best map available of the general distribution of Mississippian mound centers.
Now, how do we translate this into an archaeological culture area? Do we draw a neat line around the whole thing?
One of the fun things you can do with ArcGIS is have the software plot a “minimum bounding geometry,” that is, the simplest polygon that incorporates all of the points in a map. 9
Here’s the minimum bounded geography of the Mississippian mounds, one way to approximate the Mississippian culture area.
What’s going on in the blank spaces? Iowa, for example, doesn’t recognize Mississippian sites within the state. Several platform mound sites in Minnesota used to be called Mississippian but now are reclassified as Plains Village. Does that reflect late prehistoric culture or just hair‐splitting among archaeologists?
One of the points that the early culture‐area theorists made was that precise boundaries are difficult to draw, and that different criteria, especially any single trait, could result in different configurations.
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This map shows the Kentucky subsection of the previous map, mostly from OSA site files (thanks for sharing) with one or two mound sites added that weren’t in the database.
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This, on the other hand, is the set of sites from which I could find Mississippian ceramic analyses. Some locations are from the OSA files, some from published works or unpublished CRM reports. Some have very small sample sizes. Others have very generalized analyses, such as shell versus grog temper. So the data are of variable representativeness, but to misquote Donald Rumsfeld, you go to map with the data you have and not the data you’d like to have. I will put this database, without site locations, on the MSU Archaeology lab’s data‐sharing web site, and additions or corrections will be welcome.
By the way, I also have adopted the Angel site in this map, not strictly a Kentucky site but included for reasons that should become clear in a moment.
What I’m really interested in with these data is to begin to explore the distributions of types and motifs. If the Mississippian culture can be seen as a broad iconographic community, there may be sub‐communities that share specific symbols.
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I’m thinking first of a design on the rims of plates, that John Kelly (1984) called a sunburst. Whether the Mississippian potters thought of it as a sunburst, I don’t know, but that’s a handy descriptor.
In the Mississippi‐Lowest Ohio Valleys area, the motif is expressed in incising, on a type called O’Byam Incised which has a couple of varieties. As Berle Clay pointed out to me many years ago, some Nashville or Angel Negative Painted plates carry the same basic motif, expressed in color rather than incising. In most reports, we separate the two sets of pottery by type, and don’t consider the unity of design. Yet it’s clear that they are expressing the same decorative or iconographic idea.
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This is the distribution of sites in Kentucky with reported O’Byam Incised ceramics.
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Here is the minimal bounding polygon for O’Byam Incised sherds, an approximation of the O’Byam Incised area within Kentucky.
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Here is the reported distribution of Negative Painted sunburst plates. We think of Negative Painted and incised pottery as two different categories, but the overlap in distributions is clear—
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especially when we add the minimal bounding polygon—
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and then superimpose the two datasets. So we have two ceramic type sets, but a fairly clear area of suburst motif.
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I’m going to give another example, then come back to the sunburst plates. Two distinctive Mississippian types are Kimmswick Fabric impressed, large pans with fabric‐impressed exteriors, and Wickliffe Thick, a funnel‐like vessel form characterized by thick walls and, often, grog temper.
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Here’s the Kentucky distribution of Kimmswick Fabric Impressed. These vessels are sometime called salt pans, but a lot of sherds have interior polish, and I think they’re general‐purpose cooking pans, like woks.
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Here’s the geometric area of Kimmswick pans in Kentucky.
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Wickliffe Thick is an odd form whose function is not at all clear. Often, implicitly if rarely explicitly, Wickliffe funnels and Kimmswick pans are thought of as functionally and spatially connected.
Here’s the distribution of Wickliffe Thick as reported from Kentucky. There are far fewer sites. I suspect that Kimmswick is relatively easy to identify, but that analysts who haven’t worked with Wickliffe Thick might find it harder to distinguish, and therefore it may be under‐reported.
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Here’s the Wickliffe Thick bounded area in Kentucky—
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and here are the two areas superimposed. The distributions do not suggest that the two vessel forms are functionally related.
Ultimately, the Kentucky segments of these distributions are not that interesting in themselves. It will be much more interesting if we can compile and map the same sorts of data from all of the states with Mississippian ceramics, and maybe some that don’t recognize Mississippian sites but have similar motifs in their ceramics.
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To go back to the sunburst plates, John Kelly (1984, 2001) pointed out some years ago that Wells and Crable Incised, primarily Illinois types centered on Cahokia, are basically the same vessel form and design set as O’Byam Incised, and that they change in parallel, fairly contemporaneous ways. In all three groups, ceramic analysts distinguish specific types and varieties based on temper, engraving versus incising versus trailing, width of the everted rim, and, who knows, day of the week the analysis was done. If we could map them together, what would the distribution look like? As Kelly pointed out, there are Carthage Incised and Moundville Engraved plates from Moundville that could— and should‐ fall into the same form and motif map.
What would the sunburst culture area look like? Could we distinguish a Mississippian sub‐community that shared this, and perhaps other motifs?
We have two sets of problems here. One is the theoretical problem of what these larger and smaller iconographic communities mean in terms of shared ideas, shared iconography, shared identity. We will be able to approach this problem better if we can use modern mapping technology to explore distributions of types, varieties, motifs, and design elements in ceramics and other materials, to see how they overlap and also how they vary.
The other problem is the practical one of compiling the databases. For the Kentucky ceramics, I have access to a fairly good library, but I know I’m missing some data, particularly analyses that are referenced in manuscripts on file at OSA or 25
elsewhere. Trying to compile similar data from surrounding states will require concerted efforts from a number of colleagues or their hapless students.
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Equally important, we have to share the data. I am fully aware that site locations are confidential, and I understand why. But balkanizing the state site file data and locking them away from the scholarly community impedes our common progress towards understanding the archaeological record. Maybe we need to create a merit badge for data‐sharing.
Modern technologies offer opportunities for data analysis that were out of reach a couple of decades ago. They also offer opportunities to revisit and perhaps rethink concepts, like culture area and archaeological area, that we take for granted, even as we test hypotheses and explore newer theoretical constructs, like an archaeology of cultural identity.
References
Kelly, John E. 1984 Wells Incised or O’Byam Incised variety Wells and its context in the American Bottom. Presented to the Paducah Ceramics Conference, Paducah KY, 30 May 1984.
Kelly, John E. 2001 The historical and distributional significance of Wells Incised Plates. Paper presented to the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, Chattanooga TN, November 14‐17.
Wissler, Clark 1923 Man and Culture. Thomas Y. Crowell, New York.
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