Both coring data and trench excavation demonstrate that Mound D, the largest mound at Carson, was built in four stages and that stages II and III were the largest stages. Sediment cores excavated in mound and offmound contexts suggest the site was constructed over a crevasse splay, a high-elevation landform. This research relies on environmental, ethnohistoric, and archaeological data to provide a historically contingent description of the processes leading to the development of one of the largest and most important archaeological sites in the region. This dissertation research focuses on the time period just before Spanish contact, the Mississippi Period (AD 1200-1540), and on Mississippian culture, and it investigates how monuments were built and used in a rapidly changing and dynamic landscape, one in which the meandering and flooding Mississippi river affected the long-term formation of social and political networks. Chronicles written by certain members of the Hernando de Soto expedition offer exciting glimpses into the landscape and lifeways of Native American societies in 1541, but they do not shed light on how the landscape of chiefdoms in the Lower Mississippi Valley developed during the period before Spanish contact. This project considers the development of the cultural landscape of Native American chiefdoms in the Yazoo Basin of northwestern Mississippi. Here we describe recent investigations at Carson and present preliminary findings forthcoming publications will emphasize strategies of power, monumentality, craft production, and Mississippian exchange systems. Excavations on the mound summit reveal evidence of several superimposed structures that were burned in place and likely used for the production of stone, shell, and wooden craft items, perhaps related to Mississippi Ideational Interaction Sphere (MIIS) paraphernalia. Sediment coring and trench excavation also demonstrate that Carson’s Mound D was built in four stages, with Stages II and III comprising the major stages of earth moving. In some instances, flood-borne sediments were found on mound flanks, indicating that at times river-based flooding may have interrupted mound construction.
Sediment coring demonstrates a laterally transgressing Mississippi River system deposited coarse sandy ridges and clay-filled swales underneath a surface horizon comprised of variously coarse to medium-fine sediment originating from generalized overbank flooding. Recent sediment coring, excavation, artifact analyses, and radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shed light on earthworks and household structures at Carson, and on Mississippian culture in the Yazoo Basin more generally.
Investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), located in Coahoma County, Mississippi, have uncovered data on the development of a large Mississippian mound center dating to the period from A.D.
0 kommentar(er)
