Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser bring together an eclectic set of Mississippian scholars with the goal of building on the foundational namesake volume coedited by J. Daniels Rogers and Bruce D. Smith (Mississippian Communities and Households, University of Alabama Press, 1995). This new volume extends and strengthens the legacy of the seminal work, successfully incorporating new perspectives without tossing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Contributors reflect on the legacy of household and community studies in Mississippian archaeology while presenting an array of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches situated within detail-oriented case studies. Case studies come from across the US Southeast and portions of the Midwest, spanning the Mississippian cultural period of the early to mid-second millennium AD.
Revisiting Mississippian Communities and Households comprises 13 chapters divided into four thematic sections. Part I, “Articulating Communities and Households,” explores the physical and social scales that connected Mississippian communities and households. Malouchos (Chapter 1) reviews archaeological investigations of households and communities and situates the reader within the existing theoretical literature before zeroing in on the Mississippian Southeast. Tamira K. Brennan (Chapter 2) examines the intersections between mound building, pottery practices, and settlement organization as they relate to the negotiation of social memory for new communities at Cahokia, Illinois, and at the Kincaid mounds in southern Illinois. Duncan P. McKinnon (Chapter 3) expands on such relational approaches and the multiscalar nature of assemblages by employing ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature to examine intra/interregional interactions that shaped community membership at the Battle Mound, an ancestral Caddoan site in southwestern Arkansas. Erin S. Nelson (Chapter 4) likewise utilizes ethnographic data to explore the role of sacred fires and kinship ties in place making and community maintenance practices in the Yazoo Basin of northwestern Mississippi. Benjamin A. Steere (Chapter 5) employs large, multiregional datasets to assess how broad societal changes across the US Southeast might be gleaned from shifts in household architecture.
Part II, “Coalescing and Conflicting Communities,” explores how community relationships were forged and how communities fissioned amid societal unrest and conflict in Mississippian societies. In Chapter 6, Edmond A. Boudreaux, Paige A. Ford, and Heidi A. de Gregory examine communal place making between corporate groups via mortuary rituals and the transformation of household structures into cemeteries at Town Creek in North Carolina. Meghan E. Buchanan and Melissa R. Baltus (Chapter 7) assess related sets of household activities as evident through household pottery and architecture surrounding warfare and conflict, challenging a static conception of the “Vacant Quarter” in the Late Mississippian American Bottom region of Illinois. This section includes fewer chapters than others, but authors thoughtfully explore dynamic processes of community making and mediation amid conflict, highlighting subtle but often meaningful diversity in corporate group practices.
Part III, “Community and Cosmos,” examines the creation and maintenance of households and communities across multiple entangled spatial and intangible social scales that are inherently linked with Mississippian cosmological practices. Adam King (Chapter 8) focuses on the social and physical components of community-making practices at the Etowah site in Georgia, assessing how new material traditions were steeped in deeper histories and world renewal practices. In Chapter 9, Malouchos and Betzenhauser discuss the roles of storage in the coalescence of American Bottom communities, arguing that storage pits were components of larger assemblages of earthmoving practices that served to reinforce new forms of Cahokian spatiality and community. Christopher B. Rodning and Amber R. Thorpe (Chapter 10) utilize Cherokee oral traditions to investigate how sacred fire was shared between public structures known as townhouses and household dwellings within the community at Coweeta Creek in southwestern North Carolina, with architectural forms acting as cosmograms that reinforced household identities and spatialized cosmological relationships.
Part IV, “Movement, Memory, and Histories,” focuses on the movement of people, materials, and memory in shaping community interactions and identities. Keith Ashley (Chapter 11) explores the mediation of new coalescing communities of the Mill Cove Complex of northeastern Florida, detailing foundational mound-building events that served to connect immigrants to their historic origins. In Chapter 12, Jera R. Davis branches beyond a focus on monumentality by investigating the persistence of specific crafting traditions at rural nonmound sites in the hinterlands of Moundville during the decline of this major mound center in west-central Alabama, arguing that the endurance of reciprocity practices continued to link dispersed economic corporate groups following the site's abandonment. Stefan Brannan and Jennifer Birch (Chapter 13) likewise emphasize the utility of multiple scales of analysis, utilizing geophysical data to assess the movement of communities over time at Singer-Moye in the Chattahoochee Valley of Georgia, emphasizing the significance of collective memory in physically shaping the demarcation of social boundaries.
Contributors to this volume successfully demonstrate the relational nature and intersecting social dimensions of households and the communities of which they were part. Chapter authors utilize multiscalar datasets with a particular focus on pottery practices and settlement organization alongside broader regional histories as clues of community making and everyday life. However, the benefits of the large datasets used in this volume can come at the momentary expense of clarity and flow in some parts of the book. Heavy data discussions in some chapters may be daunting to nonspecialists, at times masking the more significant conclusions and broader contributions. Although not a volume one may choose to read lightheartedly from cover to cover, this work presents a better understanding of the dynamic Mississippian world through new scholarship grounded in historical contingency, relationality, and multiscalar perspectives. Specialists in Mississippian archaeology will want to consult individual chapters for ideas and details, and more general audiences will find interesting discussions of themes that have broader relevance in archaeology.
