Prehistoric Archaeology in the Southeastern United States, 1970-1985

Abstract

The first Europeans who ventured into the forests of southeastern North America found them inhabited by a dense and diverse native population. It is clear from the sixteenth-century Spanish accounts that many of these pop­ ulations consisted of village farmers who were organized into complex, hierarchical polities of the sort that anthropologists call chiefdoms. The surviving descriptions of these explorations are replete with mentions of powerful leaders who lived in elaborate residences situated on mounds, collected tribute from distant vassals, and were capable of mobilizing large contingents of warriors to deploy against their enemies. Although these polities were not as centralized or vast as those of the Aztecs or Incas, they nevertheless were the most complex societies to be found north of Mexico. A major preoccupation of southeastern archaeologists over the last half century has been to trace the historical trajectories by which these societies developed. In recent years, there has also been a self-conscious effort to explain these trajectories in material-ecological terms. Although such un­ derstanding still remains elusive, the Southeast continues to be viewed by many as an ideal place for studying the development of tribal and chiefly societies in temperate environments. For present purposes, the southeastern United States is defined as that part of the country east of (and including) the Mississippi Valley and south of the Tennessee-Kentucky line . It includes the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as the eastern portions of Arkansas and Louisiana. Physiographically, the area