Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1983 - 56

Science

in Archaeology
Tracing

Status
in

and

Diet

Prehistoric
Tennessee

by James
Richarda.

In times of plenty, Indian villagers
contributed to communal stores of
surplus food, but during a shortage
the chief and his family had first choice.
When Europeans first began to explore
and colonize the New World, they encountered populous and complexly organized agricultural societies throughout
much of what is now the southeastern
United States. Today, American archaeologists regard these societies as
part of the "Mississippian Culture."
They believe this culture originated
shortly before A.D.900 and replaced older
lifestyles throughout much of the Mississippi River drainage and its southern
tributaries.
The fascinating eyewitness accounts
of sixteenth to early eighteenth-century
Mississippian life found in the chronicles
of Hernando DeSoto, Antoine Le Page
du Pratz and other explorers reveal a
social order of tremendous diversity and
richness. Many anthropologists believe
it was the most sophisticated lifestyle
ever achievednorth of Mexico. Ritualized
ancestor worship, impressive political
hierarchies and authoritarian rule in the
hands of an elite lineage are described
in these accounts, suggesting broad
organizational similarities to the Contact
James W.Hatch is an Assistant Professor
of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania
State University He has participated in
archaeological projects in Georgia, New
Mexicoand Pennsylvania , and willdirect
Maya skeletal excavations at Copan ,
Honduras. Richard A. Geidel is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at The
Pennsylvania State University. His
ongoing research interests include trace
element and dietary studies.
56

ARCHAEOLOGY

W. Hatch
Geidel

and

period chiefdoms of Central and South
America, Polynesia and Africa.
As impressive as they were to early
European observers, southeastern societies experienced a remarkably rapid
decline. Slave raiding and the introduction of infectious diseases by European
settlers are believed to have initiated a
catastrophic population collapse in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As
a result, scholars interested in the social
order of traditional southeastern societies and the many details of Mississippian social life not addressed in the early
chronicles are necessarily led to the
archaeological record of these people and
their immediate predecessors. Research
on one particular Mississippian group,
the Dallas society of eastern Tennessee,
has yielded much information about this
group's social order, especially about the
relationship between social status and
diet in prehistoric Dallas communities.
Dallas society
Between a.D. 1300 and 1550, Dallas
villages were widely distributed over the
broad, rolling floor of the Great Valleyin
eastern Tennessee and northwestern
Georgia. Surveys and excavations of
Dallas sites during the past century have
provided an excellent, although incomplete, record of settlement, subsistence
and community organization. Three
types of villages were built by the Dallas
people. The largest, in which up to a
thousand or more people may have
resided, have been found at key locations
in the Tennessee River drainage, where
tributaries leave the rugged mountain
ranges to the east and first enter the
Great Valley, as well as along the Tennessee River-Cumberland Plateau interface at the valley's western edge.
Multiple earthen mounds, fortifications
and numerous wattle-and-daub, singleroom households are often encountered
at such sites. Intermediate-sized villages
contained a few dozen to a few hundred
people, and mounds and stockades may
or may not have been present. The
smallest Dallas habitation sites were
farming hamlets of a half dozen or more
households. Dallas people tended to
locate all three village types near fertile
alluvial soils necessary for the cultivation
of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and
other foodstuffs.
The social organization of Dallas
communities has been primarily investi-

gated through the study of burial patterning within and between sites. By
studying the elaborateness of the graves,
their locations within the village, and
the artifacts buried as tribute by the
mourners, archaeologists have discovered that the treatment of the deceased
in Dallas society varied according to
social standing. Adults, and in particular
adult males, tended to be buried with a
greater number of goods, primarily
utilitarian items such as cooking vessels
and chipped stone tools. A select number
of graves, however,contained quantities
of finely crafted items made of such
non-local materials as native copper and
marine shell. These objects, including
headdresses, ritual weapons and ceremonial drinking cups, were largely reserved for the ruling elite and their
political associates. The burials of adult
females and children discovered with
these same restricted artifacts indicate
that the Dallas elite made symbolic use
of material wealth and that access to a
number of important political positions
was by birthright.
The dominant architectural features
of larger Dallas villages were flat-topped
earthen mounds which often served as
substructures for buildings important
to the community's civic and religious
affairs. Burials with artifacts denoting
high political standing wereconcentrated
in the floors of these structures or on the
slopes of the mounds themselves. Interment in Dallas mounds, although socially restricted, was apparently not an
exclusive prerogative of ruling families.
Others so honored have been recognized
bv their grave goods as servants, shamans, and soldiers or guards. Away from
the mounds, in the more remote sections
of the villages, are disproportionately
greater numbers of female and sub-adult
burials which contain very few artifacts.
This general pattern is typical only of
the larger Dallas sites. Smaller villages
and farming hamlets contained few
burials of high-status individuals, suggesting that these communities were
politically subordinate to the larger ones.
Mounds in the more southerly or downriver sites, such as the Hixon and the
Dallas sites, contained burials of people
who held positions of intermediate political authority, in addition to those of
high rank. This pattern indicates that a
more complex political hierarchy existed
in these southern communities compared

Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1983

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1983