Households and the Emergence of the Moundville Polity

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With National Science support, Drs Margaret and John Scarry and their collaborators will conduct two field seasons of archaeological research at a series of sites in the Black Warrior Valley in west central Alabama. Their work will focus on the emergence, ca. 1000 A,D, of Mississippian societies which constructed the National Historic Register site of Moundville. At approximately this time in a number of regions in the US South, Midwest and Southwest groups underwent a significant cultural transformation. Prior to that time, people subsisted by agriculture and lived in small, largely egalitarian village groups. There is very little evidence for social stratification or inherited rights or privileges and likewise evidence for large scale cooperative activities in the form of monumental structures is lacking. At Moundville and many other sites however the picture rapidly changed and societies became hierarchically organized and politically centralized. These changes involved significant shifts in material culture, in economic structures , in relationships among individuals, households and larger social units and in the ways people viewed themselves, their societies and the world at large. Because of the large imposing mounds which give the site its name, extensive research efforts over the past century have produced detailed pictures of the polity and of the growth of the paramount center at Moundville. However much less is understood about the process which led to this transformation and this issue forms the core of Drs. Scarrys' research. The team will conduct archaeological excavation at a site adjacent to Moundville which dates from the immediate preceding period. They will also excavated at an early phase (Moundville I) community in Moundville itself as well as dispersed rural sites which also characterized this latter time interval. Because families form a crucial unit of adaptation, the project is designed to collect information on household subsistence economies and craft production, on variation in wealth and status among households, on relationships among households and on the nature of supra-household social groupings. The team will also examine and synthesize relevant data collected in numerous past excavations.Although no North American prehistoric society reached the formal level of "civilization", the same processes which led to the development of complexity in other parts of the world occurred here as well and study of sites such as Moundville can provide scientists with fundamental knowledge of how social development occurs over time. This research will shed important new light on the prehistory of the United States. It will also play an important training function and will provide a structured research experience for many students.