F OR many years the idea has been generally accepted that the strongly classstratified social organization of the seventeenth-century Natchez was a unique, even ephemeral, phenomenon in North America. In opposition to this, notes by Swanton (1911:84-382), Steward (1947:97-98), Willey (1949:10612), and others have indicated a wider occurrence in both time and space. It now seems probable that this type of social organization was found among groups other than the Natchez in historic times, and that at an earlier level, perhaps A.D. 1100-1300, it was the prevailing mode of social organization characteristic of a culture area roughly coincident with the lower Gulf Coastal Plain from East Texas to Tampa Bay in Florida. It may be well to first indicate the salient features of this type of social organization as documented for the Natchez, and to point out seemingly related features in the cultures of other historic groups. We will then outline the culture area as defined archeologically in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and indicate specific cases in which there is archeological evidence for the existence of this social system. It will then be possible to discuss its origins and its breakdown in late prehistoric times. In briefest outline, the data for the Natchez and Taensa indicate the existence of a type of social organization having as major features clearly defined social classes, each with specific sociopolitical functions. These ranged from a near sacred ruling class, the Suns, through a not too readily separable class of specially privileged nobles, closely related to the Suns. At the bottom of the pile was the bulk of the population, the Stinkards (Swanton 1911:138-81). Physical demonstrations of the privileged position of the upper classes were numerous. And, in retrospect at least, certain of these demonstrations might be expected to leave traces archeologically recoverable. These would include special ornaments, dwelling places on mounds, movement in litters, and mortuary ceremonialism which included retainer sacrifice, sacrifice of wives, and interment of these in graves whose locations were patterned with respect to the grave of the key individual whose death started the cycle. There seems to have been a rather rigid placement of graves according to rank, after rites and ceremonies involving the use of a scaffold or platform. It is entirely possible to see in these mortuary ceremonies physical demonstration of the rigidly stratified social system. There are scattered references in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, assembled by Swanton (1911), which indicate the existence of a preeminent, near sacred position for the chief, movement in litters, and dwellings on a mound in interior Alabama (pp. 152-234), among the Apalachee of the Florida Northwest Coast and Southwest Georgia (pp. 116-18) and