Mound Excavations at Moundville: Architecture, Elites and Social Order

By Vernon James Knight

How social and political power was wielded in order to build Moundville

This work is a state-of-the-art, data-rich study of excavations undertaken at the Moundville site in west central Alabama, one of the largest and most complex of the mound sites of pre-contact North America. Despite the site's importance and sustained attention by researchers, until now it has lacked a comprehensive analysis of its modern excavations. Richly documented by maps, artifact photo-graphs, profiles of strata, and inventories of materials found, the present work explores one expression of social complexity; the significance of Moundville’s monumental architecture, including its earthen mounds; the pole-frame architecture that once occupied the summits of these mounds; and the associated middens that reveal the culture of Moundville’s elites.   This book supplies a survey of important materials recovered in more than a decade of recent excavations of seven mounds and related areas under the author’s direction, as part of a long-term archaeological project consisting of new field work at the Mississippian political and ceremonial center of Moundville.   Visitors to Moundville are immediately impressed with its monumentality. The expansiveness and grandness of that landscape are, of course, deliberate features that have a story to tell and this archaeological project reveals Moundville’s monumentality and its significance to the people whose capital town it was.   Exactly how the social and political power symbolized by mound building was distributed is a question central to this work. It seems critical to ask to what extent this monumental landscape was the product of a chief’s ability to recruit and direct the labor of large groups of political subordinates, most of whom were presumably non-kin. At the onset of the present project, speculations regarding the paired orders of mounds and the timing of the formal structuring of space at Moundville were already suggested but were in need of further testing, confirmation, and refinement. The work reported in this volume is largely devoted to filling in such evidence and refining those initial insights. An excellent chapter by H. Edwin Jackson and Susan L. Scott, "Zooarchaeology of Mounds Q, G, E, F, and R," compliments this research.   A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9780817381516

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Introduction to the Mound Excavations, 1989–1998

During the 10-year span 1989–1998, The University of Alabama's Department of Anthropology undertook, under my direction, a long-term archaeological project consisting of new fieldwork at the Mississippian political and ceremonial center of Moundville. This volume reports the results of that research.

Moundville is a fortified settlement of some 75 ha (185 acres) with 32 earthen mounds arranged around a central plaza. It is generally conceded to be the second-largest center of the Mississippian stage (ca. A.D. 1000–1600) in the eastern United States and the largest of the Mississippian centers in the Gulf states of the Southeast. As Moundville Archaeological Park, the site is now a public facility owned by The University of Alabama (UA), with an on-site museum. This well-preserved site has been known to archaeologists since the nineteenth century and has an ample record of previous scholarly research (Knight and Steponaitis 1998; Peebles 1981; Peebles et al. 1982). Moundville is widely regarded as a premier example of a prehistoric chiefdom, and in recent years Moundville and its hinterland have been active arenas for research into a number of aspects of chiefdoms. The present work explores one expression of social complexity, the significance of Moundville's monumental architecture: its earthen mounds, the pole-frame architecture that once occupied the summits of these mounds, and the associated middens that reveal the culture of Moundville's elites. Before discussing the goals of this project, it will be helpful to give a sketch of the site and its environment.

The Moundville Site and Its Surroundings

Moundville is the central site of an archaeological culture that occupies a portion of the alluvial valley of the Black Warrior River in west-central Alabama. Sites of this archaeological culture are found almost exclusively within the confines of the alluvial valley proper, where there are soils well suited to corn agriculture. Moundville-related sites, which probably number in the hundreds, are distributed from present-day Tuscaloosa southward approximately 60 km, within that portion of the alluvial valley that traverses the Fall Line Hills physiographic district of the upper east Gulf Coastal Plain. The Fall Line Hills is a moderately dissected band of terrain whose natural cover is an oak–pine forest. This district is bounded on its northern margin by the Fall Line, beyond which are found the geologically older rock formations of the Cumberland Plateau. Bordering the Fall Line Hills to the south is the Black Prairie district. The Black Warrior alluvial valley, some 10 to 15 km wide in the Fall Line Hills section, is characterized by terrace deposits naturally covered by oak–gum–cypress forest. The river crosscuts the physiographic zones just named from north to south and constitutes part of the greater Alabama–Tombigbee watershed that empties into the Gulf of Mexico at present-day Mobile.

Moundvillians were an agricultural people, and thus it is no accident that they occupied a concentrated pocket of deep, rich, well-drained terrace soils. Just south of the Fall Line, the alluvial valley of the Black Warrior reaches its greatest width, where the drop in gradient causes the river to dump much of its sediment load. From that point south beyond Moundville, the river has created a meander-belt environment consisting of a mosaic of oxbow lakes, cypress swamps, point bars, active and relict levees, and low terrace remnants. This is a classic environment for Mississippian corn farmers living in small, dispersed settlements at low densities (Smith 1978). Lacking the technologies of raised fields and of irrigation, they depended on silt from predictable floodwaters to enrich the soil, while taking advantage of old channel features for protein capture in the form of fish, waterfowl, and other aquatic fauna. White-tailed deer and other mammals were attracted to cornfields and perhaps were as often taken opportunistically as hunted per se (Muller 1997:232).

South of Moundville, as the Black Warrior River enters the Black Prairie, the character of the alluvial valley changes. Here, terrace soils are more poorly drained and a greater proportion of the valley is covered by swampland ill-suited for agriculture. Moundville-related sites diminish in this zone.

Moundville-related sites in the alluvial valley are mostly very small settlements without mounds, which at present tend to be lumped together under the rubric farmstead, although so few have been excavated that it is hard to judge to what degree these are really redundant (Maxham 2000; Myer 2002). In addition to these nonmound settlements there are approximately a dozen single-mound sites, most of which are also very small, in most cases too small to be considered villages. For some time we have tended to view these single-mound sites as elite residences and administrative nodes subordinate to the Moundville center (Knight and Steponaitis 1998), although this interpretation is open to challenge. Systematic site survey in Moundville's hinterlands shows that there is no tendency for sites to aggregate near the Moundville center. Instead, access to well-drained, loose sandy loam soils and access to the river are key locational determinants. Small nonmound sites tend to be found in loose clusters that seem to form finite hinterland communities, most often centered on a single-mound site (Myer 2002).

The Moundville site proper (Figure 1.1) occupies a high, flat Plio-Pleistocene terrace, immune to flooding, at Hemphill Bend on the Black Warrior River. Moundville is the only multiple-mound site in the valley. Its occupied area is roughly coincident with the confines of its palisade wall, which enclosed approximately 75 ha of flat ground. Within this area there were originally some 32 earthen mounds, 21 of which are truncated pyramids arranged around a single large, quadrilateral plaza. The 29 mounds that survive today are given letter designations. Central to the arrangement is Mound A, a large mound with a base about 60 by 107 m and a broad summit plateau 6.7 m high. Mound A's most peculiar aspect is its orientation contrary to that of the large mounds of the plaza periphery, which are oriented to the cardinal directions. At the north-central position on the plaza lies Mound B, one of the largest Mississippian mounds in the southern states, with basal dimensions of about 59 by 107 m and a height of 17.9 m. Immediately to the north of Mound B is a broad, low artificial platform designated Mound V. As far as is known, all of the mounds on the plaza periphery were substructures for pole-frame architecture, including those in which small numbers of human burials have been found. Despite the presence of burials, the latter are not burial mounds in the sense of earthen monuments built to commemorate the human remains buried within. The specific roles of the plaza-periphery mounds, considered as a set, constitute one of the central problems of this study. Several of the smaller mounds lying between the mounds of the plaza periphery and the palisade line were evidently dome shaped rather than flat topped; based on present knowledge, these few may have been true burial mounds.

Evidence of domestic occupation of the flat terrace surface exists in most places lying between the plaza and the palisade line. Where excavations have been conducted, these domestic areas have yielded preserved sheet middens and the remains of houses densely arranged in house groups. These house groups may have been organized by kin ties. Often superimposed on the house groups are cemeteries of varying size (Wilson 2008).

Moundville was continually occupied roughly from A.D. 1120 through A.D. 1520, about 400 years in all. During this time there were significant changes in the appearance and the structuring of space at the center; these changes are in part the subject of this volume. Currently, the chronology of the center is measured by reference to three ceramic phases labeled Moundville I through Moundville III, each of which is broken down into early and late subphases. I will defer a discussion of these phases until the following chapter.

History of Moundville Research

This study is grounded in a strong tradition of Moundville research built up over the course of more than a century. The literature is extensive, and I can do little more than provide the briefest of outlines here. More detailed reviews can be found in the following sources: Peebles 1981, Steponaitis 1983a, 1983b, and Walthall et al. 2002.

The first published excavations were done in 1869, and further visits were made to the site by agents of the Smithsonian's Division of Mound Exploration in 1882 and 1883 (Steponaitis 1983b; Weiss 1998). Philadelphia archaeologist Clarence B. Moore made two major forays into the site in 1905 and 1906, excavating in all of the large mounds and many of the flat-ground cemeteries (Moore 1905, 1907). Moore mapped the site and documented 801 burials, recovering a large sample of artifacts in the process. His abundantly illustrated accounts of the work provide a baseline for all subsequent Moundville research (Knight, ed. 1996).

Between 1930 and 1941 the Alabama Museum of Natural History conducted additional broad-scale excavations at Moundville. These excavations, under the overall direction of Walter B. Jones, concentrated on the remaining flat-ground cemeteries and the foundation footprints of various park facilities then under construction. This Depression-era work allowed the definition of Moundville culture and its place in the prehistory of the region (DeJarnette 1952). The documentation from this work formed the basis for later dissertation research by Douglas McKenzie (1964) and Christopher Peebles (1974).

Moundville archaeology during the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by the research of Christopher Peebles and his students, who combined research on the older collections with new excavations. Employing an admirable division of labor, this group of scholars explored a number of previously neglected concerns: chronology, social organization, political economy, settlement patterns, subsistence, and health. The edited volume Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom (Knight and Steponaitis, eds. 1998, 2007) is a serviceable guide to these and a number of follow-up studies. At present, yet another generation of Moundville scholarship is prospering. Students are once again combining collections research with new survey and excavation, and they are beginning to offer substantial refinements to the older models.

Propositions, Hypotheses, and Project Goals

Visitors to Moundville are immediately impressed with its monumentality. Moundville, as its name reveals, is a place of mounds. These mounds, and the large artificial spaces surrounding them, are much more than the eye can take in at any given moment. A walk across the site takes time, and in such a walk, more large mounds are gradually revealed, such that the scale of the place seems to grow steadily in an often surprising way. The expansiveness and grandness of that landscape are, of course, deliberate features that have a story to tell. This archaeological project was conceived as an investigation of Moundville's monumentality and its significance to the people whose capital town this was.

Bruce Trigger's (1990) useful discussion of monumental architecture describes such architecture as a special case of Thorstein Veblen's (1899) concept of conspicuous consumption. In this view, monumental architecture is a demonstration of power. It is built at a scale that far exceeds any practical requirement, and it makes visible the social and political power of elites to command the labor of their followers. Trigger (1990:125) argues that the ability to expend energy, especially in the form of other people's labour, in non-utilitarian ways is the most basic and universally understood symbol of power. Monumental architecture is experienced as the embodiment of enormous quantities of human energy, and thus it serves as a permanent, physical symbol of the ability of the builders to control that energy.

Although monumental architecture is not exclusive to complex societies (Gibson and Carr 2004), it is certainly ubiquitous in chiefdoms and early states, and it correlates well with increasing social stratification (Trigger 1990:120). In the case of Moundville, there are preliminary clues that the building of its mound-and-plaza arrangement had to do with the inauguration of a new, potentially stratified social order. By stratified, I mean a cultural ordering of social segments such that their members were notably unequal in respect to their ability to control or exploit production and labor, especially that of non-kin (see Adams 1975; Hendon 1991). Models of Moundville's economy to date have emphasized elite control over productive resources (Steponaitis 1978, 1991; Welch 1991, 1996; Welch and Scarry 1995), although recent research has begun to question the extent of that control (Marcoux 2007; Muller 1997; Wilson 2001).

Exactly how the social and political power symbolized by mound building was distributed is a question central to this work. It seems critical to ask to what extent this monumental landscape was the product of a chief's ability to recruit and direct the labor of large groups of political subordinates, most of whom were presumably non-kin. The topic entails a subsidiary question: was this largely conscripted, corvée labor or was the labor instead volunteered by followers or cult devotees? A preliminary answer to this question, based on analogy to data from the historic southeastern tribes, is that mound building probably took place in the context of communal, world renewal ceremonialism.

An ethnohistoric perspective on southeastern earth mound construction leads to a conception of mounds not as solitary monuments but as the accumulated products of ritual cycles. Mounds were built up in stages, in layer-cake fashion, through episodes of destruction and then purification by the burial of the old surface. It was an expressive act, and in that sense the mounds are an aspect of expressive culture. The ethnologist John Swanton (1928a) understood this when he made his early attempt to account for Mississippian mounds by reference to historic Creek Indian customs. It was not the mound itself but the ritual of mound building that was significant. Clues from southeastern Indian lexical data, mythology, and beliefs suggest that quadrilateral mounds represented the earth island concept, a cosmological vision of the earth as a four-sided construction afloat in a primordial sea. If so, it follows that the mounds are a category of sacra manipulated in ritual (Knight 1986, 1989a).

This brings us to yet another question that cannot be avoided if the goal is to model social arrangements that account for the facts. Large Mississippian centers, of which Moundville has always been a prime example, are characterized by numerous mounds of various sizes arranged around plazas. In such cases, what does the phenomenon of multiple mounds signify? There are several conceivable answers. It is certain, for example, that platform mounds were devoted to different uses. Among well-documented cases elsewhere, some supported dwellings of chiefs or other elites, others supported mortuary temples, others supported council houses, while still others were marker mounds, memorializing things of importance on the landscape. Richard Krause (1990) argued that certain mounds were cenotaphs, memorializing not the person of the chief but the office of chiefship. However, although this multiplicity of uses is incontrovertible, by itself it can scarcely account for arrangements, like Moundville's, having upwards of 20 major mounds.

One must ask, then, what were the social units to which individual monuments pertained? Several partly antithetical answers have been suggested. One is that in multiple-mound settings, particular mounds were sponsored by the leaders of subcommunities that had coalesced into larger political entities (Blitz 1999). Here is a position that resonates with a strong tendency to view individual mounds as the purview of town chiefs and their lineages (e.g., Hally 1996; Wesler 2006; Williams 1995). In this platforms-as-chiefs view, to use Wesler's phrase, renewal of mound surfaces by the addition of earth mantles is a matter of chiefly succession (Anderson 1994). But this view is difficult to square with the use-variability of mounds just mentioned. A different answer is that individual mounds were sponsored by a variety of social domains, prominent among which were kin groups in a segmentary structure (Knight 1989a, 1998; Knight and Steponaitis 1998). Yet another recent suggestion is that mounds were sponsored by sodalities—voluntary associations or interest groups that crosscut kin groups—and that these were specifically sodalities dedicated to world renewal ritual (Byers 2006). Still others would argue for combinations of all of the above. As Robert Hall (2007:103) has written, with the great site of Cahokia in mind, I have no quarrel with seeing many if not most of the lesser platform mounds at Cahokia as the bases for lodges serving the needs of clans, sodalities, and a variety of priesthoods. I have long believed that.

Numerous Mississippian platform mounds similar to those at Moundville have been excavated in whole or in part, including examples at large, multiple-mound sites. Likewise, numerous structure foundations on the summits of these mounds have been reported, revealing a variety of forms and architectural styles. What has been largely overlooked in all this work, if I may be allowed to generalize, has been attention to evidence for specific uses among the reported structures. There has been, I think, a general failure to treat Mississippian public and elite architecture at major sites comparatively, with a view toward establishing differing roles of structures of various kinds and sizes. Even a rudimentary classification of summit structures as residences, lineage houses, temples, or council houses is often lacking. Instead, the goals of such reporting to date have mostly been descriptive and chronological.

In part, this deficit is because southeasternists of previous decades were conditioned by the literature of the time to call all Mississippian pyramidal constructions by a prejudicial label, temple mounds. Summit structures found thereon were temples (e.g., Ford and Willey 1941). A different term, domiciliary mound, had been preferred prior to World War II (e.g., Moore 1905; Shetrone 1930), which was just as inadequate and for the same reason. Such generic labels imply that Mississippian mound summit architecture was of a standard kind, with a standard use. Southeastern archaeologists have known better for decades, but for some reason the urge to oversimplify this situation is not quite overcome. In truth, the more that is learned about buildings on Mississippian mounds, the more they reveal an impressive diversity of summit use. It has been a long learning process to fully realize that, at the larger centers, all sorts of Mississippian buildings were mounded. It is our task to document that variability.

A principal key to understanding this variability of use, the comparative study of artifact assemblages gleaned from middens and feature fills associated with these structures, has been likewise neglected (Knight 2004). Generally, structure floors on Mississippian mounds tend to be rather clean and do not produce useful floor assemblages; associated refuse has to be sought elsewhere, that is, generally speaking, on the mound flanks, where dumps of midden are often found that can be correlated stratigraphically with the mound summits from which the refuse was generated (Smith and Williams 1994). Needless to say, such middens ought to be sampled using modern fine-screen recovery methods designed to extract dietary remains and other small items. At the beginning of the present work, this had rarely been done.

Not many years have passed since Mississippian mounds drew southeastern archaeologists like magnets. Much of the archaeological labor at Mississippian sites accomplished during the great era of New Deal work relief programs, prior to World War II (Lyon 1996), was devoted to mounds, often at the expense of excavation of the flat ground surrounding them, let alone nonmound settlements in the hinterlands of the big sites. In that respect, however, the Moundville site is an exception. Despite the vast scale of the excavations there by the Alabama Museum of Natural History during the Depression years, very little of it was in mounds. What there was constituted minor trenching of mound flanks to observe stratigraphy and to ascertain original dimensions. Thus, as of the late 1980s, Moundville was unique among the major Mississippian centers in having no information available whatsoever about architectural remains in and on mounds.

Despite the shortage of research to date directed toward an understanding of the mounds at Moundville, some statements have been made in regard to their spatial patterning and dating. Moreover, in the past two decades there have been advances in understanding the significance of Mississippian mound building as ritual and in understanding the variability in use of the summits of these mounds.

The arrangement of mounds at Moundville has long been recognized as being in some sense a planned order. Indeed, as early as 1905 Clarence B. Moore (1905:130) was convinced that the mounds were built according to some fixed plan. While that order can yield to more than one interpretation (see Morgan 1980), there appears to be a consensus in favor of a single central plaza of rectangular shape, bordered on the east, south, and west sides by rows of mounds and on the north by Mounds R, B, and E. Mound A is central to the arrangement. The most explicit prior statement on this order was by Peebles (1971:82), drawing on the mound burial data from Moore's early excavations:

[M]ounds containing burials are paired one with another across the plaza and are separated one from the other by mounds containing no burials. If a north–south line is drawn from Mound B through Mound A, and if a series of parallel lines are drawn from one mound to another across this north–south line and along the axis of the winter solstice, then the mounds along the east and west margins of the plaza can be paired up as follows: Mounds R and E, burials not present; Mounds Q and F, burials present; Mounds P and G, burials not present; Mounds O and H, burials present; Mounds N and I, burials not present. Mounds C and D, to the north of the main plaza, both have burials included in them[.] . . . I suspect that if further excavations are conducted on these mounds the structures which would be found would mark the mounds without burials (which in general have the larger platforms) as domiciliary mounds and the mounds with burials as temple mounds.

Figure 1.2 illustrates the bilateral symmetry of the mound layout along a north–south axis defined by Mounds A and B and the perfect alternation of small mounds containing burials with larger mounds lacking burials along the margins of the plaza. Together with the bilateral symmetry and the alternation of mortuary and nonmortuary mounds on the plaza periphery, Peebles (1971:83, 87) also discerned a structured use of status space at Moundville, most notably in the tendency of special-use buildings to be located near the plaza and high-status burials to be located on the northern half of the site.

Lending weight to the idea that Moundville's mounds exhibit a deliberate spatial order, beyond their positioning on the margins of a plaza, is the observation that those mounds not containing burials decrease in volume from north to south. Starting with Mound B at the north-central position, mound volume among these alternating mounds decreases with perfect regularity moving both clockwise and counterclockwise around the plaza margins (Figure 1.3). If mound size at large centers reflects the ability of their sponsors to mobilize human labor (see Blitz and Livingood 2004), then these abilities appear to degrade from north to south. I have pointed out that this arrangement finds an ethnographic analog in a diagram of a Chickasaw camp square reported by Frank Speck, in which kin segments (matrilineal house groups) were arranged by order of decreasing rank around a rectilinear plaza (Knight 1998).

In the same paper I suggested, moreover, that there is more to the alternation of mortuary and nonmortuary mounds and their possible pairing across the plaza as suggested by Peebles. Assuming that there were two kinds of mounds on the plaza periphery, elite residential and mortuary temple mounds, I stated that [i]n my reading of the phenomenon, each residential mound is paired with at least one adjacent mound showing a mortuary use. This suggests that the basic building block of the Moundville mound group, so often repeated throughout the Mississippian sphere, is the functional pairing of a noble residence with an ancestral mortuary temple. It seems reasonable to suppose that each such pair at Moundville is an architectural manifestation of one of the primary corporate segments of the Moundville community (Knight 1998:51–52). In short, this model envisions the plaza-periphery group of mounds as a sociogram of kin segments, in which mounds of two main kinds are laid out in a maplike fashion as a diagrammatic ceremonial center. By monumentalizing the rank order of the segments, the builders were declaring a fixed vision of a hierarchical social structure, one that would thenceforth affect and channel social energies, either in support of that structure or subversive to it.

As to when, in the Moundville sequence, this formal arrangement became established, Vincas Steponaitis in the late 1980s found reason to cast doubt on his earlier reconstruction that saw only one mound (Mound O) as being present early in the sequence and the remainder of the pattern being filled in by increments later (Steponaitis 1983a:152–156). Steponaitis's earlier reconstruction had been based on the mound excavations of Nathaniel T. Lupton and Clarence B. Moore, which, however, only rarely penetrated to the lower portion of any mound. Thus, the mound data available at that time were strongly biased in favor of the later part of the occupation sequence. Upon further reflection, based on a new analysis of the distribution and dating of sheet midden at the site, Steponaitis (1992:10) concluded that a major change in land use occurred at Moundville sometime during the 13th century A.D. . . . The nature of this change was dramatic. It was almost as though a new ‘zoning ordinance’ took a large block of residential land and reserved it almost exclusively for civic-ceremonial use. A large plaza and adjacent ceremonial precincts were laid out, and many of the people who had lived in this area moved elsewhere. While virtually all of the identifiable sheet midden belonged to the early part of the sequence, in contrast, most of the burials were late, leading to the surprising conclusion that most of the people buried at Moundville had not actually lived there.

Working independently, I reached a convergent conclusion in the late 1980s while studying a number of small curated collections from Mounds H, I, J, K, and L as background for this project. These older curated collections had been acquired in 1937 by the Alabama Museum of Natural History when test trenches were placed into the flanks of certain eroded mounds to ascertain their original size and contours for the purpose of restoring them. My findings, first reported in an unpublished paper (Knight 1989b) and now incorporated in Chapter 7 of this work, were that only one of these mounds had evidence of occupation extending into the later history of the site. In other words, mound building along the plaza periphery was early, but in Moundville's later history many of these mounds had been abandoned, especially along the southern margin. The abandonment of mounds during the later history of the site was also hinted at by Joseph O. Vogel's eastern palisade excavations (Vogel and Allen 1985), in which it was discovered that a small Moundville I phase mound in that area was decommissioned in order to extend the palisade line across it.

These chronological insights were incorporated into papers presented at a symposium for the 1993 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in St. Louis. Somewhat later, papers from that symposium (Knight 1998; Knight and Steponaitis 1998; Steponaitis 1998) appeared in a volume published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, which The University of Alabama Press has recently seen fit to reprint (Knight and Steponaitis 2007).

Given this background, at the onset of the present project, statements regarding the paired order of mounds and the timing of the formal structuring of space at Moundville were already in the air but were in need of further testing, confirmation, and refinement. The work reported in this volume is largely devoted to filling in such evidence and refining those initial insights. Prior suggestions, then, contributed to the formulation of two main hypotheses that have structured the present research.

Hypothesis 1: Concurrent Initial Construction

If the apparent symmetries, mound pairings, and diametric regularities of the mound group do reflect a sociogram, such a planned order might have been imposed early in the site's history. According to a preliminary study of diagnostic potsherds from mounds on the southern plaza margin, several of the mounds making up this order do not appear to have been occupied late in the site's history. If so, the apparent regularities are not the product of a late-emerging coherence imposed on some earlier pattern. The first hypothesis is, then, that the timing of initial mound construction on the plaza periphery was coordinated and is contemporaneous with the political consolidation of the region some time during the thirteenth century A.D. (late Moundville I–early Moundville II phase in our pottery chronology).

Hypothesis 2: Dichotomy of Mound Use

One of the most striking aspects of the apparent patterning is the alternation around the plaza margins of small mounds having a mortuary use with larger mounds lacking such a use. Some 35 years ago Christopher Peebles articulated a hypothesis concerning this alternation. Excavations should reveal that there are two main types of mounds. The small mounds would have supported mortuary shrines conforming to the pattern of elite southeastern temples documented from the sixteenth century onward (DePratter 1983). The large mounds were the residences of the elites. If so, both the summit architecture and the associated artifact assemblages from feature fill and midden contexts should reveal such a basic dichotomy. It should be possible to develop an artifact pattern or signature associated with each mound type.

Plan of the Research

Reflecting on the kinds of data that would be required to resolve these issues, in 1989 I prepared the initial draft of a research design. A massive and expensive program of excavations into these often complex mound deposits was never my intent, particularly because I wanted to acknowledge preservationist concerns in my research. Instead, prior experience in the excavation of mounds suggested that satisfactory data on the issues laid out could be had by limited flank trenching, combined with judicious horizontal exposure of preserved summit floors. The need for new excavations was also lessened by the existence of curated collections from minor Depression-era trenches into seven of the mounds at the Moundville site. I was able to locate additional Depression-era collections from five other mounds, which evidently derived from mound clearing, restoration, and sodding. Finally, unpublished collections were available from Mound M, where David DeJarnette had taught UA Department of Anthropology field schools during 1970–1971.

To achieve these goals it was necessary to develop new data on both categories of mounds then posited: the small mortuary temple mounds and the larger elite residential mounds. As controlled collections were already available for most of the southern tier of mounds on the plaza periphery (Mounds H, I, J, K, L, and M), I decided to concentrate on the better-preserved mounds on the north margin of the plaza (going clockwise, Mounds P, Q, R, E, F, and G). Narrow trenches into the flanks of these mounds, deliberately placed in areas possessing developed flank midden, were to provide two complementary kinds of things. First on the agenda was the chronology of construction, to be gotten by recording the number of mound stages and by carefully dating the stage surfaces by radiocarbon. Second was the sampling of flank middens, excavated carefully to distinguish these from episodes of mound fill and slope wash. These middens were to produce artifact assemblages and dietary remains that would allow us to characterize summit activity. In addition to the flank trenching, I wanted to do some amount of broad horizontal excavation on mound summits in order to expose patterns of summit architecture, a category of data at that time entirely missing in Moundville archaeology. Because such horizontal exposure is time consuming, extremely costly, and far more intrusive than flank trenching, I decided to limit this kind of excavation to two mounds, one of each category. Besides this work on the mounds of the plaza periphery, I also wanted to devote some attention to the larger, centrally placed mounds (A, B, and V) to better define their roles. I envisioned the latter work as limited summit testing. As initially proposed, the project would consume six field seasons.

To set all this in motion, in January 1989 I submitted a proposal to the Research Grants Committee of The University of Alabama for a small sum in order to analyze the Depression-era collections from the mounds, to prepare new contour maps of Mounds P and Q where new work was anticipated, and to otherwise prepare for the work to come. Upon being favored with that grant, I carried out the preparatory work in the summer of 1989. Later during the same year, I submitted a research design to the Moundville Site Advisory Board, whose approval was generously granted shortly thereafter. I further solicited and received the support of the Alabama Museum of Natural History, then under the directorship of Douglas E. Jones. Acting as a cooperating partner, the museum staff lent archaeological equipment, transportation, and logistical support. Following the mapping of Mound Q, project excavations began in that mound in August 1989, employing a field school from The University of Alabama Department of Anthropology.

As the project unfolded, its objectives were carried out using a combination of resources. First, Department of Anthropology field schools under my direction were devoted to the project each fall semester from 1989 to 1994 and from 1996 to 1998. These field schools were made up of undergraduates enrolled in the course Field Archaeology, and most sessions also included graduate students enrolled in Advanced Field Archaeology. The latter served in the role of field assistants, aiding in the undergraduate instruction and in note taking. Fall semester field schools were complemented at intervals by spring semester undergraduate classes in Laboratory Methods in Archaeology, in the course of which much of the cataloging and preliminary analysis of artifacts was done.

A second resource of profound importance was the Expedition program of the Alabama Museum of Natural History. That program, which moves annually to a new field site, manages to channel the energies of very large numbers of participants in a carefully supervised camp setting. Participants frequently are returnees from earlier Expeditions, and thus many have some archaeological training. I employed the Expedition during a single summer, that of 1992 (otherwise entirely avoiding fieldwork during blistering Alabama summers). With this large and pleasant company we were able to complete the majority of the excavation of the Mound Q summit within the short space of one month.

Finally, I could not have brought to completion a project of this scope without external funding. The Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation saw fit to award multiyear grants to this effort in 1993–1994 and again in 1998–1999. The first of these grants permitted the outright hiring of experienced crews who, under supervision of UA graduate students, were assigned to critical excavation tasks including the flank trenching of Mounds R, E, F, and G and the broad-scale summit excavations on Mound E. The second two-year grant again allowed for the support of UA graduate students in laboratory work, analyzing a backlog of artifacts, and preparing photographs, maps, and illustrations. This second NSF grant also provided salaries for two consecutive summers, during which I was able to complete the write-up of the Mound Q excavations, which forms Chapter 4 of this volume.

Conduct of the Work

I take it as given that large projects tend to evolve beyond what was initially proposed. That most certainly applies to the present case. What I originally envisioned as a six-year stint of fieldwork expanded into a full decade, while laboratory work and writing consumed nine more years beyond that. Nor was the 1998 field season really the end of the fieldwork.

Because my original research design called for limited testing of Mound V, the fall 1999 field school was devoted to that objective. However, the Mound V testing led to the completely unanticipated discovery of a large earth lodge on its summit. Investigation of this earth lodge ultimately consumed four fall field schools through 2002 and also a second stint by the Alabama Museum of Natural History's Expedition program in 2001. As the Mound V earth lodge excavation focused mainly on a single structure and is, in a sense, a self-contained spin-off of the research reported herein, I quite arbitrarily decided to bring closure to the mound project by cutting it off at the end of the 1998 fieldwork. An account of the earth lodge excavations has been published separately (Knight 2009).

I must point out the special role played by Mound Q in the progress of our field research. As Mound Q was the first to be examined using both flank and summit excavations, the procedures used later on the other mounds were tried out here first and refined where necessary. As will be explained in detail in Chapter 4, Mound Q is where we first employed a separate mound grid as distinct from the site grid, where we used peripheral augering to locate flank middens, where we developed flank trenching using side-by-side control and reference trenches, and where we conducted broad horizontal summit excavations aimed at revealing a minimally disturbed target floor. Here, too, our protocols for field and laboratory recording were worked out, in some cases gradually over the course of more than one field