Late Prehistoric Settlement Patterning in the Yazoo Basin and Natchez Bluffs Regions of the Lower Mississippi Valley

Moving Earth and Building Monuments at the Carson Mounds Site, Coahoma County, Mississippi

“…It is worthwhile to note that when standing in the bottom of the channel scar, Mound A looks almost twice as large-this strategy in mound construction is reminiscent of some mounds in the Natchez Bluffs that similarly make use of the natural topography, such as Anna and Emerald [23]. Furthermore, at the nearby sites of Parchman and Salomon, the principal mounds are both similar in that they appear much larger from the channel bed than from the surrounding landscape.…”

“…Archaeologists have long endeavored to outline major developments in Native American settlement of Mississippi's Yazoo Basin [12,23,68,69,. A regional chronology was initially completed by the Lower Mississippi Survey [13,14] in the mid-20th century.…”

“…1100 AD [12]. However, in some cases, the environment has also figured significantly into archaeological research evaluating how Mississippian societies adapted their ideologies, settlement patterns, social systems, and political economies to a variety of different environments (e.g., [23,28,29]). Recently, some researchers have started calling for a reappraisal of older Mississippian models and for the recognition of variation over similarity in Mississippian societies (e.g., the chiefdom concept, [30][31][32][33][34]).…”

“…Archaeological approaches to Mississippian socio-political complexity have traditionally focused on political economy [16][17][18] and ideology [19][20][21][22] as a means to explain the rapid florescence of large-scale mound building (although mound building takes place during the Late Archaic and Middle Woodland periods, it is not seen at as large a scale as during the Mississippi period [23]), agriculture, and a ubiquitous symbolic religious system [24,25], [26, page 7], [27] at around. 1100 AD [12].…”