This volume includes 10 chapters focused on the Mississippi period of northern Georgia and the coastal plain, one on mountainous areas of western North Carolina (Christopher Rodning, Chapter 5), and one on southwestern Virginia (Meyers, Chapter 9). It is less a volume on the southern Appalachians than it is on Mississippian societies of the Piedmont and coastal plain areas of Georgia and South Carolina, and the book is dedicated to the career and influence of David Hally, professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. Although Hally's career has been focused principally on sites in northern Georgia, his work has far broader influence. The chapters deal with three long-standing contributions of Hally's work: Hally circles (that is, Hally's well-known model of the geographical extent and spacing of Mississippian chiefdoms), social archaeology (which Hally has characterized as a form of “paleoethnography”), and multiscalar approaches to archaeological inquiry.
The preface by Jim Langford and Marvin Smith gives a biographical narrative of Hally's archaeological career and details his far-reaching influences on archaeology of the U.S. Southeast in terms of former students as well as colleagues whom he mentored and influenced. Hally circles also describe well his own spheres of influence in the world of Southeastern archaeology. An afterword by Robbie Ethridge provides an overview of Hally's career and influence, and it offers some comments on chapter contributions.
In the Introduction, Meyers and Gougeon discuss scales of analysis reflected in Hally's career and influence: pottery, households, and community and regional survey. Ceramics are the ground floor of community organization. The study of households (archaeologically, domestic structures) connect to larger processes at the community and regional scale. Volume authors address these different scales.
Julie Markin (Chapter 1) discusses spatial clustering of sites dating to Woodland and Mississippian periods, with emphasis on population growth and the rise of inequality. She argues for in-place development of chiefdoms based on continuities in stamped ceramics.
John Worth (Chapter 2) uses a design type analysis of Lamar Bold Incised ceramics to examine whether they more closely reflect social interaction (passive) or information exchange (emblematic). He argues that the assemblages reflect the former, with no evidence of the latter essentially reflecting the habitus of individual potters. He suggests a need for addressing subtypological dimensions of stylistic variation in pottery as a way to examine individual potters and their navigation of increasing complex social landscapes.
Smith (Chapter 3) wonders if it is possible to determine which seventeenth-century sites reflect remnants of specific, historically known sixteenth-century chiefdoms by examining ceramic decorative motifs. Like Worth, he examines emblematic styles vis-à-vis social interaction. Although there are some temporal changes in incised decoration, there are none in incised motifs. There is some clustering but with overlap. In the same way that Worth does, Smith sees little evidence for emblematic style but more evidence for social interaction.
Gougeon (Chapter 4) addresses classifying spaces based in pattern language as opposed to architectural grammar to examine social norms. He argues that this approach is more dynamic than trait list comparisons, and it is better suited for connecting patterns when shifting from scale to scale—a central theme of this volume.
Rodning (Chapter 5) examines social relations through the built environment, principally through considering public structures known as “townhouses” at the Coweeta Creek site. He argues that the shift away from platform mounds to large townhouses was not a de-emphasis of monumentality, but in fact, different combinations of aspects of monumentality at different scales to accommodate more people. This was likely due, in part, to European contact and colonialism.
M. Jared Wood (Chapter 6) examines the spacing of mound centers in light of Hally's model and alternative models, such as fission/fusion and alternating occupations. He argues that the models are not mutually exclusive, and that differences reflect different sociopolitical processes.
Keith Stephenson and colleagues (Chapter 7) maintain that Coastal Plain sites are different from Piedmont/fall-line sites because they were corporately structured. They use a sequential analysis of ceramic seriations and radiocarbon dates to show general agreement with sequential occupations at Coastal Plain sites rather than contemporaneity.
John Chamblee and Mark Williams (Chapter 8) try to extend the social archaeology approach from Late Mississippian Lamar to the Middle Mississippian Savannah period. They find that some changes were driven by trade and exchange, but others probably driven by processes of social interaction.
Meyers (Chapter 9) addresses the concepts of frontiers, paths to power, and the differential nature of what it means to be “Mississippian.” It appears that Meyers is making a case for a chiefdom, but it seems plausible that power at Carter-Robinson was more corporately structured like Coastal Plain sites (also, arguably, on frontiers or peripheries).
Patrick Livingood (Chapter 10) addresses Hally circles—the spacing of chiefdoms in straight-line distances. He augments Hally's model with travel-time analyses and linguistic evidence from the Choctaw language about chiefdom territories and the spacing of settlements within them. Chiefdoms and subordinate centers were typically separated by no more than one half-day's travel time, enabling chiefs to move between chiefdom centers and subordinate settlements in one day.
This book is an important contribution to archaeology of the U.S. Southeast, in keeping with Hally's own pioneering and rigorous work in the field. Contributors have not simply applied Hally's models and approaches, but they have expanded them to other areas of southern Appalachia, examined them more closely with new data, and/or augmented them with new analyses and lines of evidence. This volume is essential reading for those working in the Mississippian Southeast, and it is a useful frame of reference for those working with stratified agricultural societies in other areas of the world.
