Reconsidering Mississippian Communities and Households

Explores the archaeology of Mississippian communities and households using new data and advances in method and theory

First published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, was a foundational text that advanced southeastern archaeology in significant ways and brought household-level archaeology to the forefront of the field. The impressive breadth of case studies presented allowed archaeologists to grapple with the complexities of Mississippian social organization across the region.

Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume. Edited by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser, this new volume advances the field further with the diverse perspectives of current social theory and methods and big data as applied to communities in Native America from the AD 900s to 1700s and from northeast Florida to southwest Arkansas. The book is divided into four parts with overarching themes: articulating communities and households; coalescing and conflicting communities; community and cosmos; and movement, memory, and histories.

Watts Malouchos and Betzenhauser bring together scholars researching diverse Mississippian Southeast and Midwest sites to investigate aspects of community and household construction, maintenance, and dissolution. By tacking back and forth between daily domestic practices and wider communal landscapes, contributors engage with communities and households as locations of daily social, political, economic, and religious negotiations. Thirteen original case studies prove that community can be enacted and expressed in various ways, including in feasting, pottery styles, war and conflict, and mortuary treatments.