New Perspectives in Mississippian Archaeology

In recent years the pace of research on the late prehistoric Mississippian societies of eastern North America has accelerated. New data, methods, and theoretical goals are changing perspectives in Mississippian archaeology. Regional overviews and site syntheses provide unprecedented insights into th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of archaeological research Vol. 18; no. 1; pp. 1 - 39
Main Author Blitz, John H.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Boston Springer 01.03.2010
Springer US
Subjects
Academic discipline
Anthropology
Archaeological paradigms
Archaeological sites
Archaeological theory
Archaeology
Chiefdoms
Cultural history
Iconography
Material culture
Mississippi
North America
Paleoanthropology
Place
Polities
Pottery
Social archaeology
Social evolution
Social Sciences
U.S.A
Valleys
Archaeology
Prehistoric
Mississippian
North America
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Summary:In recent years the pace of research on the late prehistoric Mississippian societies of eastern North America has accelerated. New data, methods, and theoretical goals are changing perspectives in Mississippian archaeology. Regional overviews and site syntheses provide unprecedented insights into the Mississippian phenomenon at local, regional, and continental scales. Traditional culture history, processualism, historical processualism, iconography, and neo-Darwinian archaeology are active theoretical orientations. Important research focuses on variability in Mississippian sociopolitical formations over time, organizational diversity among contemporaneous societies, and sources of political power. The new historicism and iconography place agency, identity, origins, factionalism, ideology, and meaning at the center of culture change, while many processualists continue to focus on developmental histories, economy, and control of material resources. Advances in physical and chemical analyses and the availability of remote sensing techniques are changing how Mississippian archaeology is conducted and expanding the kinds of data that are recovered. These diverse interests, methods, and goals have created considerable eclecticism in Mississippian archaeology.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:1059-0161
1573-7756
DOI:10.1007/s10814-009-9033-y