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

Abstract

The application of combined techniques such as aerial imagery, sediment coring, down-hole magnetic susceptibility, and mechanized trench excavation can provide critical information on landscape formation and mound stratigraphy, specifically if they can be used to understand mound sequences and development. This paper reviews preliminary findings from recent coring and test excavations at the Carson mounds site (22CO505) in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Aerial imagery assisted in the characterization of a crevasse ridge flood deposit underlying the site and detailed field descriptions of the pedology corroborated its existence. Subsequent sediment coring and trench excavation revealed the nature of flooding in prehistory, indicating that high-intensity floods were responsible for the formation of the crevasse ridge and that lower intensity floods were potentially responsible for interruptions in mound building at the site. This suggests that the Carson settlement was initiated on an actively flooding landform. Down-hole magnetic susceptibility correlated effectively with the pedology; however, it also helped discern anthropogenic surfaces (i.e., occupational layers) that are difficult to identify visually, such as those we found in Mound C. Findings from this pilot study demonstrate the utility of sediment coring and magnetic susceptibility as effective and feasible methods for developing hypothesisdriven research.

Mound building and summit architecture at the Carson site, a Mississippian mound center in the southeastern United States

“…The Carson Mounds Archaeological Project (CMAP) conducted excavations at Carson from 2012 to 2015 (Mehta et al., 2012, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). Over 80 sediment cores were taken across the Carson landscape, three trenches were excavated in Mound D, 12 horizontal excavation blocks were opened on the Mound D summit, several excavation blocks opened in the village, and numerous radiocarbon dates and one OSL date were processed.…”

“…While earthen monuments are critical to understanding Mississippian social organization (King, 2001; Mehta, 2013; Mehta et al., 2012: 5; Payne, 1994; Trigger, 1990), hierarchy and monumentality are not directly correlated. Globally, monuments are salient aspects of emergent nonhierarchical, nonagricultural, and/or nonsedentary societies (Bradley, 1998; Burger and Rosenswig, 2012; Gibson, 2004; Heckenberger, 2005; Kolb, 1994, 2006; Pluckhahn and Thompson, 2018; Saunders et al., 2005; Schaan, 2008; Smith, 2003; Thompson and Andrus, 2011; Thompson and Pluckhahn, 2011).…”