INVESTIGATING
The Vacant Quarter
JAN UNDERWORD
The highlighted section of this map shows the area that archaeologist Stephen Williams called the Vacant Quarter. The red dots denote sites that were recently investigated by Charles Cobb and his team, or previously investigated by other archaeologists. The data from the previously investigated sites informed Cobb’s work. There are other sites that aren’t shown on the map that define the Vacant Quarter’s boundaries.
In the mid 1400s, Native Americans largely abandoned a large section of the central United States. Archaeologists, with a little help from an eighteenth-century cleric, have launched a new effort to understand why. By David Malakoff
I
n 1978, archaeologist Stephen Williams was touring ancient settlement sites around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers when an intriguing “notion came to me,” he later recalled. Williams, a Harvard University professor who had worked in the Central and Southeastern United States for decades, knew that the archaeological evidence
american archaeology
showed that many of the sites had hosted thriving communities, some with thousands of people, during the Mississippian Period, which lasted from roughly A. D. 800 to 1550. Some featured the huge earthen ceremonial mounds that were a hallmark of Mississippian peoples. But Williams was also aware of a growing number of studies suggesting that
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