The Averett Culture: Migration, Mississippianization, and Community Practice in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley
Swisher, Kimberly
2024
Abstract
This dissertation project explores the impact of politically stratified, hierarchical immigrants on local non-stratified communities in the precolonial southeastern United States and the processes under which these interactions occurred. Migrations have occurred throughout human history and were as important in the past as they are today, particularly with concerns such as cultural identity, interactions between groups of people, land, and security. Along with the movement of people comes not just practices and ideas, but physical bodies and objects that occupy area and space differently. The results of these massive social and cultural changes occur throughout time and space all over the world, with archaeological interest particularly focused on changes in political institutions and subsistence patterns. However, these archaeological studies in the past have often assumed that changes occur ubiquitously and unilaterally. This assumption minimizes the autonomy and agency of the local populations who are acting, interacting, and reacting to these changes and to the immigrant populations. One of the frequently discussed shifts in the eastern United States that highlights and provides a case-study for these large-scale changes is the Mississippian period and culture which was characterized by an increase in population, sedentism, agriculture, trade networks, shared iconography and ideologies, hierarchical political stratification, intensified monumental construction, and the emergence and peak of chiefdoms and chiefly centers. During the 12th and 13th centuries AD, a population of politically stratified peoples culturally known as Mississippian migrated from what is now central Alabama to the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley in southern Georgia, occupied at the time by non-stratified, hunter-gatherer groups. This project explores the impact of immigration on these local non-stratified communities known collectively as the Averett culture and how they adapted to the arrival of Mississippian peoples. This research focuses on two separate Averett archaeological sites at the northern and southern known areas for the Averett community. By focusing on evidence for local- and regional-scale transformations, this project provides unique insights into the social and political processes and practices that defined the spread of Mississippian lifeways across the Lower South. Toward this aim, several interrelated domains of archaeological data are evaluated including subsistence, crafting, site organization, and regional organization from these sites before, during, and after evidence of Mississippian culture and practices appear in this region. Together, these domains incorporate a range of practices through which local Averett populations either incorporated Mississippian lifeways or actively resisted doing so. By integrating data from archaeological excavations, radiocarbon dating, botanical analyses, and museum collections, I can evaluate different models of social and cultural interactions amongst and between Averett and Mississippian communities. By producing a more complete record of social and cultural practices for Averett communities and investigating Averett cultural sites, this dissertation project informs the broader study of processes involved and variation in changes to complex socio-political phenomena such as practices of agricultural intensification and social inequality. I do this by addressing the research question: how did Late Woodland Averett communities along the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley adapt to the arrival of Mississippian peoples?Deep Blue DOI
Subjects
Averett Lower Chattahoochee River Valley Late Woodland Mississippian Cultural Interaction Archaeology
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