NEW REVELATIONS AT MOUNDVILLE

Researchers have extracted new information about this community’s elites from Mound Q (shown here),as well as from other mounds.

Recentresearchatthis well-knownMississippiantownisproviding apictureofitsriseandfallandthevaryingbehaviorofitselites.

By Mike Toner

John Blitz peers intently at the potsherds in his hand. One is an undistinguished piece of reddish clay, the other a fragment of dark gray ceramic. To most people they are merely broken bits of ancient pots. To Blitz, they confirm that, nearly a thousand years ago, two very different cultures met and mingled in eastern Alabama along one of prehistoric America’s most important cultural divides.

“These artifacts aren’t particularly fancy, but I like to tell my students it’s not what you find, but what you find out,” Blitz says. “And these two types of pottery are quite informative because they bridge two cultures.”

“Look at this,” he says, thrusting the sherds under a magnifying glass. “This one, the one with reddish bits of fired clay, is what the Woodland people used to strengthen their pots for use on open fires. The gray one is tempered with little bits of mussel shell. That’s a later technique, definitely from early Moundville.”

For weeks, Blitz’s University of Alabama field school has been excavating a clearing near the entrance to Alabama’s Moundville Archaeological Park, which is located south of Tuscaloosa. The low, grassy rise is Mound X, the 24th mound discovered at the site. Embedded in the mound, they have found a line of post molds from the palisade that once encircled Moundville. The superimposition of the postholes on the mound itself means that the mound predated the fortified perimeter, which was erected between A.D. 1200 and 1250.

By sampling Mound X and other sites on the periphery of Moundville, Blitz hopes to piece together a picture of emerging Mississippian culture—a record of tools and midden deposits that reflect the beginnings of the social stratification so characteristic of Moundville and other chiefdoms.

The 340-acre park south of Tuscaloosa protects one of the largest intact Mississippian sites in the country—a prime example of the indigenous city-states that arose in the Southeast a thousand years ago with the advent of large-scale agriculture. For 500 years, these mound cities, supported by an economy of maize, beans, squash and

The rattlesnake disk is the best-known artifact found at Moundville.Recent analysis of its stone and iconographic style have shown that both were locally produced.

Moundville’s two largest mounds,B (foreground) and A (center),stand out in the aerial photograph.Moundville has been investigated since the 1860s and consequently it’s better understood than many other Mississippian centers.

other crops, dominated the cultural landscape of the region. The remnants of these cities are among the most complex archaeological sites in Eastern North America today, and despite more than a century of investigations at Moundville, surprises continue to unfold.

Recent studies by archaeologist Vernon James Knight of the University of Alabama anthropology department, and by University of North Carolina archaeologist Vincas Steponaitis, have not only provided new insights into the rise and fall of Moundville itself but also altered some long-held notions about the people who once ruled it.

Until recently, Mississippian life was viewed through the lens of earlier archaeological investigations that emphasized burials, burial goods, and the kinds of artifacts found in museum showcases; material that painted Mississippian life with broad brush strokes. Knight and Steponaitis have focused on many of the details that others passed over— microscopic bits of bone and cornhusks in the ancient middens, flakes of paint, and tiny fragments of copper. Aided by tools unavailable to earlier investigators—from computers to analyze the distribution of recovered artifacts to ground penetrating radar to map the foundations of long-vanished structures—they have documented details of Mississippian life that would have been impossible at less preserved sites.

Knight, who has spent much of his career studying Moundville, says the old view of Mississippian cities being ruled by a monolithic elite that controlled a community’s land, labor, trade, crafts, and rituals may be a conceptual “crutch that glosses over complex and variable social realities.” Moundville, he says, changed markedly over time. And the elites who presided over it engaged in surprisingly diverse activities that appear to have varied from mound to mound. “Past studies looked at some of the differences between chiefs and commoners, but the more closely we look at the elites themselves, the more differentiation we see.”

Knight was surprised to discover during recent excavations at Mound Q, a modest mound at the edge of the city’s central plaza, that it was not the temple or shrine he had been expecting. Instead, he found the outlines of “modest, multiple, permanent structures” and simple pits for storing food, but no evidence of periodic feasting. Although there were clear signs that the occupants enjoyed elite status—middens yielded evidence of choice cuts of meat, and lots of passenger pigeon bones, a Mississippian elite delicacy—the mound had a decidedly lived-in look.

He found the mound’s middens “densely packed with debris carrying the strong flavor of domestic routine”— utilitarian cookware, animal bones and seeds that he says

reflect a widely varied diet. Paint palettes, sandstone saws, flakes of worked stone, and fish bone needles that appear to have been used for tattooing, show the occupants of Mound Q were also heavily engaged in craftwork, with much of the material imported from hundreds miles away. Fragments of crushed human skulls, feet and hands, suggest that they may have displayed skulls or other bones, but Knight found no indication of sacrifices.

The increasingly detailed understanding of Moundville’s history that Knight, Steponaitis, Blitz, and other researchers have gleaned is possible, in part, because most of the archaeologists who conducted Moundville’s early investigations published their findings, and cataloged and preserved what they collected. Such a scientific approach was unusual at that time.

Artifacts excavated from the major mounds by the famous archaeologist C. B. Moore in 1905, back when the site was still part of a cotton plantation, now reside with the Museum of the American Indian. In addition to other small collections at the Smithsonian Institution and the Alabama Museum of Natural History, more than 600,000 artifacts—and 2,100 sets of human remains excavated by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s—are housed at the Erskine Ramsey Archaeological Repository at the Moundville site. “Moundville has incredible stylistic diversity of artifacts,” says Steponaitis. Some of these artifacts were produced at Moundville, others were obtained from other regions via trade. Moundville was part of an active trade network that extended from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Steponaitis has analyzed items from these collections in an attempt to identify a

“coherent regional style.” Identifying this style—a process that consists of an analysis of the iconography as well as the materials from which the artifacts were crafted—will help him and other researchers determine which artifacts were made at Moundville, and that in turn speaks to the question of the activities of the elites.

Excavations at Mound G, on the opposite side of the city’s plaza from Mound Q, suggest differences between the two mounds’ inhabitants. Mound G was higher. Its residents dined on exceedingly rare dishes like shark, peregrine falcon, and bison. Analysis of their faunal remains

This arrow point of quartz crystal was recovered during excavations in Mound V.

University of Alabama field school students record trench profiles at Mound Q.The mound underwent several stages of construction,and some evidence of these stages can be seen in the trench walls.

Two researchers use ground-penetrating radar to map the dimensions of Mound X.Gradiometry,another type of remote sensing,was also used.

show that, unlike lesser elites who consumed all but the bones of their game, Mound G’s elites were given to waste. Their debris included little evidence of the craftwork that their neighbors on Mound Q engaged in. From the evidence, Knight believes this group of elites was more reclusive and less involved in interactions with the lower classes.

Knight is convinced that further excavations will show that each of Moundville’s 24 mounds, and their occupants, had a distinct character. He and Steponaitis believe that the entire city was built as a sociogram—an architectural plan based on a social order of clans that, in effect, put everyone in his or her place.“The highest ranking clans were situated along the northern edge of the plaza, and the ranks decreased progressively as one moved along both sides of the plaza to the South,” says Steponaitis.

Over the last decade, Knight and Steponaitis have also worked to document the changes in Moundville through time. Building on the work of earlier investigators, they have used radiocarbon dates, ceramic styles, and changes in iconography to piece together a 500-year chronology tracing the city’s rise to glory, an abrupt mid-life transition, and its ultimate demise.

Like other chiefdoms, Moundville rose where it did because of the area’s resources—the Black Warrior valley’s fertile soils, abundant water, and long growing season. The largest earthen pyramid, Mound B, towers 58 feet above the surrounding plain. From the summit, one can see the orderly layout of the site’s flat-topped mounds, truncated pyramids arrayed in a vast arc around a central plaza. The plaza covers an area larger than a dozen football fields. In Moundville’s heyday, the city was protected by a three-milelong wooden palisade with sentry platforms ever 100 feet.

Vernon James Knight (right) reviews field records of the floor of Mound Q.

John Blitz’s interest in the circumstances that engendered the founding and early development of Moundville led him to investigate Mound X. The wall shielded the town on three sides. The fourth side was the river.

“This was clearly a planned community,” says Knight. “We know from extensive dating that all of the mounds were built within a generation or so. It was a case of build it and they will come. And they came. Once the palisade was up, everybody moved inside. By 1250, this was a real town, complete with crying babies, barking dogs, and smoke from cooking fires.”

The city grew swiftly. “The shift to an agricultural economy ameliorated local food shortages, enabled denser concentrations of people, and created a source of wealth that could be mobilized and manipulated for political ends,” says Steponaitis.

After 1250, however, things began to change. Outlying villages grew rapidly and Moundville’s population began to shrink. As the number of residents dwindled, however, burials within the city soared—but not, apparently, because of pestilence. At about the same time, the defensive palisade was dismantled and never rebuilt. Knight says the extensive radiocarbon dating of burials and artifacts on the mounds during that period suggests Moundville was largely a vacant ceremonial center.

“All of a sudden, poof, it was transformed from a classic Mississippian chiefdom into what was essentially a necropolis, a giant cemetery controlled by the elites who lived on

University of Alabama students work at Mound X.Though it was previously recorded as a mound,there was uncertainty as to whether this low rise was the product of man or nature.The investigation confirmed that it was in fact manmade,and that it’s the community’s oldest mound,dating to the Early Moundville Phase,circa A.D..1150–1250.

top of the mounds,” says Knight. From a city of a few thousand, Moundville’s population dwindled to perhaps 300.

No other necropolis has been identified in a Mississippian city, consequently Knight was initially hesitant to use the term, which invokes images of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. But he says the thousands of burials during that period, in contrast to the dwindling population reflected in dates from mound middens, makes the conclusion hard to avoid. “The people who ruled Moundville during this period were essentially funeral directors,” he says. “And based on the number of burials we see from this period, they seem to have convinced everyone in the valley that they needed a burial at Moundville to start their journey into the afterlife.”

Abrupt changes in the art of the time, which was suddenly rife with themes of the afterlife, suggest that Moundville was now ruled by elites who extracted tribute in return for burials on now sacred ground. The art contains themes of knotted snakes, eagle-like raptors, a spitting crested bird, winged serpents, and a curious upraised hand with a single eye in the center of the palm. Recent studies of Mississippian iconography suggest such images are related to the path of souls after death. These themes are still invoked today in the oral traditions of some Native Americans.

By 1350, however, Moundville was failing even as a necropolis. “During this period, we see an increase in burials outside the city, so apparently a lot of people weren’t playing the elites’ game anymore,” Knight says. “By 1400, the lights were going out. Many mounds at the site were totally abandoned, and by 1450 only a handful had anyone living on them. De Soto and his men came through the area in the 1540s, but never mentioned Moundville or hinted there was a major center here.”

“It’s a pretty common pattern all through history,” says University of Tennessee archaeologist David Anderson, a specialist in Mississippian mound sites. “They have a few good years, a few bad years, and then a few more bad years and they fall apart. They rarely last more than a few centuries.”

Though Moundville was in decline by the early 15th century, some work was still being done there. In 2001, Knight used a gradiometer, an instrument that senses subtle variations in soil density, to map the outlines of a sunken 50-foot-square earth lodge at Mound V, one of the several mounds he’s worked at. This is the only earth lodge found and it’s one of the most recent structures discovered at Moundville, dating to the early 1400s. It has a tunnel entrance and is thought to have served as a council house. “It was so big that we would never be able to excavate all of it, but remote sensing enabled us to map the entire structure,” he says.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in our understanding of Moundville in recent years, but we still have a long ways to go,” says Steponaitis. “The collections we have will continue to be analyzed and then, of course, there are still things to be learned from the site itself.”

“It’s amazing,” agrees Blitz, watching his field crew scraping away the soil of Mound X in search of Moundville’s beginnings. “Despite extensive excavations here for over a century, much of this site is still completely unexplored.”

Vincas Steponaitis has been analyzing collections from Moundville to identify the iconography as well as the material from which the artifacts were made. This incised pottery vessel was found while excavating the earth lodge in Mound V.Moundville’s artifacts have a wide range of styles.

MIKE TONER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. His series on threats to archaeological resources, “Past in Peril,”won the Society for American Archaeology’s Gene S.Stewart Award in 2001.