A01=The University of Alabama Press
American Indians
archaeology
artifacts
Author_The University of Alabama Press
Category=NKD
ceramics
ceremonial complex
climate
Early Archaic
Eastern United States
environment
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
excavations
farming
fauna
fishing
geology
habitats
hunting
Indigenous societies
material culture
Middle Archaic
Middle Woodland
migration
mounds
Native Americans
Paleoindians
plants
Pleistocene
pottery
projectile points
public archaeology
settlement
shell middens
shellfish
southeastern archaeology
subsistence
violence
warfare
water transportation
Woodland period
Product details
- ISBN 9780817316877
- Weight: 1452g
- Dimensions: 226 x 279mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jun 2010
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This work is a state-of-the-art, data-rich study of excavations undertaken at the Moundville site in west central Alabama, one of the largest and most complex of the mound sites of pre-contact North America. Despite the site's importance and sustained attention by researchers, until now it has lacked a comprehensive analysis of its modern excavations. Richly documented by maps, artifact photographs, profiles of strata, and inventories of materials found, the present work explores one expression of social complexity; the significance of Moundville's monumental architecture, including its earthen mounds; the pole-frame architecture that once occupied the summits of these mounds; and, the associated middens that reveal the culture of Moundville's elites. ""Mound Excavations at Moundville"" supplies a survey of important materials recovered in more than a decade of recent excavations of seven mounds and related areas under the author's direction, as part of a long-term archaeological project consisting of new field work at the Mississippian political and ceremonial center of Moundville. Exactly how the social and political power symbolized by mound building was distributed is a question central to this work. It seems critical to ask to what extent this monumental landscape was the product of a chief's ability to recruit and direct the labor of large groups of political subordinates, most of whom were presumably non-kin. At the onset of the present project, speculations regarding the paired orders of mounds and the timing of the formal structuring of space at Moundville were already suggested but were in need of further testing, confirmation, and refinement. The work reported in this volume is largely devoted to filling in such evidence and refining those initial insights. An excellent chapter by H. Edwin Jackson and Susan L. Scott, 'Zooarchaeology of Mounds Q, G, E, F, and R', compliments this research.
Vernon James Knight Jr. is Professor of Anthropology at The University of Alabama. Vincas P. Steponaitis is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
