Deconstructing the emergent Mississippian concept: The case for the terminal late woodland in the American bottom

Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Fall 2002 by Fortier, Andrew C, McElrath, Dale L

ABSTRACT

The concept of the "Emergent Mississippian" as both a stage and a period is becoming entrenched in the archaeological literature. Although some have questioned its utility on conceptual and taxonomic grounds, it has been generally adopted and often uncritically applied outside of its original birthplace, the American Bottom region of southwestern Illinois. We examine this concept in light of both old and new archaeological data and from the perspective of historical processualism to point out inherent problems with this evolutionary construct. We suggest that most of the premises associated with the concept of an Emergent Mississippian period have a questionable basis in the archaeological record in the American Bottom and that the designation has outlived its usefulness in advancing our understanding of native social developments in this key area of the Eastern Woodlands. We offer the term "Terminal Late Woodland" to designate the pre-Mississippian time span during which maize agriculture assumed a key economic role in the native diet.

There is no single, simple, all encompassing and comforting theoretical explanation for the Mississippian emergence. [Smith 1990a:21

In the past 30 years, archaeologists have made dramatic strides in constructing a chronology of precolumbian native cultures in Illinois, especially in the American Bottom region of southwestern Illinois (Bareis and Porter 1984; Fowler and Hall 1975). This is largely a result of the FAI-270 Archaeological Mitigation Project and other cultural resource management-driven archaeological research. Although there have been minor disagreements among the researchers involved about chronological and taxonomic details, their efforts produced the prevailing regional chronology as presented by Bareis and Porter (1984) and in subsequent revisions (see Fortier 2001 a for the latest version). Although there are still significant gaps in our understanding of the regional prehistoric sequence, now, nearly 20 years after Bareis and Porter laid out its essentials, we are moving beyond fundamental chronology building and are beginning to focus on the larger issues of interpretation.

In many ways our current focus is an autocritique because most of today's senior American Bottom scholars were involved in the original FAI-270 fieldwork, analysis, and site report production that provided the basic chronological and cultural sequence in the early 1980s (i.e., Bareis and Porter 1984). Most had a hand in creating that expansive descriptive outline, and it is safe to say that all more or less agreed with the overall cultural-historical scenario that emerged. Although the scenario was presented as traditional "culture history," it was very much a product of its time and was influenced by the prevailing paradigms of the day. In particular, cultural ecological and evolutionary models strongly and often subtly informed our thinking. Now, we are reexamining our earlier processual stance on the archaeological record from a decidedly postprocessual perspective.

The incorporation of the term "Emergent Mississippian" into the Central Mississippi Valley lexicon also should be understood in the context of the history of American Bottom archaeology. Prior to the excavations associated with the FAI-- 270 Project, most of our knowledge concerning the late prehistoric chronology was based on salvage excavations at Cahokia (see Pauketat, this issue, and Kelly 1990a for useful summaries). In the 1970s, a single "pure" Late Woodland cultural expression (Patrick phase) and a transitional Late Woodland-Mississippian phase (e.g., Fairmount) were recognized. An "unnamed phase," for which there were several possible but poorly represented archaeological candidates, was postulated to account for the temporal gap between these units. The intensive survey of the FAI-270 corridor completed in the mid-I 970s allowed researchers (Kelly et al. 1979) to extend the American Bottom chronology back into Archaic times by comparing surface-collected diagnostics with assemblages in the Midsouth and greater Midwest.

Subsequent excavations yielded a wealth of detailed and contextually secure materials that have largely served to corroborate and refine the original FAI-270 sequence (Bareis and Porter 1984; Kelly et al. 1979). Substantial quantities of ceramics were recovered from excavated contexts, greatly expanding our data base for Woodland and Mississippian times. During the initial stages of analysis, researchers were able to fill in much of the gap (i.e., the "unnamed phase") between the Late Woodland Patrick phase and the Fairmount phase, eventually resulting in a post-Middle Woodland sequence (Kelly, Finney, et al. 1984; Kelly, Ozuk, et al. 1984) that has been accepted in the literature, albeit with subsequent modifications (Fortier 1996; Fortier and Jackson 2000; Kelly 1990a; McElrath and Fortier 2000). Kelly and his colleagues' (Kelly et al. 1979; Kelly, Finney, et al. 1984; Kelly, Ozuk, et al. 1984) pioneering efforts in using ceramics and settlement data to establish cultural continuities and identify subregional variations for this crucial period of American Bottom prehistory have largely been verified through analysis of superpositioning and through radiocarbon dating.