The Mississippian Community at Parchman Place

The final chapter offers a reconstruction of the occupational history of Parchman Place through the founding of the community in the early 14th century and continuing through its abandonment in the late 15th or early 16th century. Following this reconstruction, the chapter ties together themes considered throughout the book. Organized by scale, this tying-together begins with a look at Mississippian neighborhoods and moves through increasingly broader scales, ending with a consideration of how Mississippian people used placemaking to locate themselves and their community within the greater Mississippian cosmos. Throughout, the emphasis is on particular instances of placemaking, including the intentional deposition or emplacement of culturally meaningful substances in mound and neighborhood contexts. These practices illustrate the continued negotiations between authority and autonomy that Mississippian people navigated as they created and re-created their communities in the image of a whole and balanced world.

Mound Building at Parchman Place

Chapter 4 describes excavations, coring, and salvage work in mound contexts at Parchman Place and presents a detailed analysis of mound stratigraphy in Mounds A and E. The results of stratigraphic analyses reveal a complicated social history of mound building at the site that played out over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries and alternately emphasized social hierarchy on the one hand and heterarchical values related to balance and autonomy on the other. A number of typical and atypical mound building practices were identified, including founding events, mantle construction, building and dismantling of summit structures, veneering, truncation, and incorporation. Veneering is interpreted as a challenge to the hierarchical tendencies typically associated with mound building and Mississippian leadership in that it bundled the meaningful substances of white clay, shell, and ash. These substances, when used together, invoke ideas about wholeness and balance between different realms of the cosmos. Mound building and depositional practice were thus salient ways of negotiating community values related to status, leadership, kin group autonomy, and the Mississippian cosmos.

Ceramics, Chronology, and Community

Chapter 2 focuses on the choices Mississippian potters made in choosing materials, forming, firing, and decorating their pottery, choices that afford archaeologists a way of organizing material culture in space and time. A ceramics analysis based on types, varieties, and attributes is presented here, resulting in a refinement of the phase chronology for the northern Yazoo Basin. Based on the ceramics analysis, site stratigraphy, radiocarbon dates, and a Correspondence Analysis (CA), two chronological sub-phases were identified and their characteristics described. Parchman I corresponds to the 14th-century occupation at Parchman Place; Parchman II corresponds to the 15th-century occupation.

Mississippian Communities in the Northern Yazoo Basin

This chapter introduces the study of Mississippian communities by reviewing archaeological evidence for Mississippi period sites; social organization and worldview among Mississippian people and their descendants; and theoretical approaches to understanding the nature of human action and constraints on that action. It also reviews what we know of Mississippi period settlement in the northern Yazoo Basin, including the Parchman phase and nearby phases, some of which have been identified as Soto-era provinces or polities. Finally, this chapter provides an overview of archaeological work done at Parchman Place in order to establish what we know of the site’s physical layout and chronology. This includes a description of surface collections, mapping, excavation, and geophysical survey conducted at the site. The radiocarbon (C14) chronology from excavated contexts at Parchman Place is also presented.

Ceramics and Foodways at Parchman Place

This chapter explores Mississippian foodways at Parchman Place through a functional analysis of ceramics and a consideration of the foodways of the Native American people of the southeastern United States—the descendants of Mississippian communities. Correspondence Analysis (CA) of the results indicate the manufacture and use of two distinct pottery assemblages: (1) a baseline domestic assemblage used for everyday cooking, serving, and storage; and (2) a special-use serving assemblage used for community-wide eating events or feasts. These community feasting events played an important role in the founding and ceremonial maintenance of the Mississippian community at Parchman Place.

Spatial Practice at Parchman Place

This chapter focuses on spatial practice and social organization at Parchman Place. Geophysical surveys, magnetic gradiometry in particular, revealed burned Mississippian structures on mound summits and residential areas, subsequently confirmed through excavation. Spatial analysis of geophysical features in residential areas indicates that most neighborhoods were organized in courtyard groups around a central plaza. These neighborhoods are interpreted as analogous to the house groups of the Muskogean-speaking descendants of Mississippian people, particularly the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks. The Mississippian community at Parchman Place is likewise considered analogous to post-Mississippi period towns. Deposition of large quantities of ash and food remains near one of the neighborhoods is interpreted as analogous to the community and world renewal ceremonies of those same Mississippian descendants. Sometime during the early 15th century, one house group removed to a location away from the plaza and built their houses in two rows on either side of a path or corridor oriented toward the site’s largest platform mound. Spatial and depositional practice at Parchman Place thus encoded particular ideas about community solidarity and renewal, and social differentiation.