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From Quarry to Cornfield provides an innovative model for examining the technology of hoe production and its contribution to theagriculture of Mississippian communities.

AbstractArchaeological studies of memory have shown how the past is continually resurrected through selective practices of remembrance. Strategies of social amnesia have received less attention, however. The US southeast provides a useful vantage point for exploring how landscape and the built environment legislated acts of forgetting at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Whereas platform mounds and plazas mediated tensions between remembrance and erasure within communities prior to the arrival of Europeans, later colonial encroachments on Indigenous lands led to the increasing importance of these features as anchors of memory. This shifting, topological record embodied heterogenous, disjunctive framings of temporality.

Many attempts to understand the cultural impact of the forces of modernism, capitalism, and globalization have come to highlight contemporary cultural diversity at the expense of reifying a homogenized past of traditional, static societies. The "savage slot" still provides a convenient myth for characterizing small‐scale communities before the advent of modernism—communities that experienced dramatic change only as they were pulled into the world system. Archaeological evidence from the southeastern United States challenges this stereotype, as Native American groups routinely migrated and continually redefined notions of "place" and "locality"—processes often treated as distinctly (post)modern. Such case studies emphasize the importance of working toward a deep historical anthropology that will continue to undermine stereotypes about the Other in the past as well as the present.

▪ Abstract  During the Mississippian period (a.d. 1000–1500) the southeastern United States witnessed a broadscale fluorescence of polities characterized by impressive earthwork construction, rich mortuary offerings, and intensified agriculture. Research on the nature of complexity in these so-called chiefdoms has been an enduring issue in North American archaeology, even as this research has undergone several paradigmatic shifts. This study focuses on the primary dimensions of the archaeological record used to describe and explain variation in Mississippian complexity—polity scale, settlement and landscape, the organization of labor, mortuary ritual and ideology, and tribute and feasting. Changing perspectives toward the organization of complexity and power have become increasingly pronounced in each of these categories.

Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power. Thomas E. Emerson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.318 pp.

ABSTRACT  Multisited ethnography was advanced by George Marcus (1995) as a way to address the spatial reach of communities linked by global flows of commodities, peoples, and institutions. Although the approach is usually applied within the context of modern globalization, many of the processes that define globalization accelerated with the onset of European colonization in the 1400s C.E. Multisited research is particularly suited to the analysis of the "paradox of globalization," the simultaneous unfolding of heterogeneity and homogeneity throughout the world, which became pervasive in the colonial era. An indigenous ceramic type in eastern North America known as colonoware expresses this paradox, where variable European influence in its morphology and surface treatment can be attributed to the intersection of local practices and large‐scale population movements. [colonoware, globalization, colonialism]