Organization of Chiefdoms and Hierarchy of Control

Context in source publication

Context 1

... Mississippian system was organized around a hierarchical network of chiefdoms, some simple, others complex, with a few paramount chiefdoms (see Fig. 3), and progression from one level to another was distinguished by the increasing number of levels involved in the group's decision-making processes (Anderson 1994;Pauketat 1994).³ Simple Mississippian chiefdoms exercised authority and administrative control over a relatively small area that was com- ². Th ere is disagreement as to whether it also encompassed Etowah and Coosa, in northwestern Georgia (Hally, Smith, and Langford ). ³. A chiefdom is "a society with a defi nite structure, and with some systematic form of political organization…[including] a defi nite mechanism for replacing the political leader" (Hall : -). Service (: , -) describes chiefdoms as "redis- tributional societies with a permanent central agency of coordination… [with] pervasive inequality of persons and groups." Contact, Incorporation, and the North American Southeast  were decidedly hierarchical in nature and involved the payment of tribute (e.g. corn, preferred selections of deer meat, etc.) by the local community to those above it in the hierarchy (Kelly 1997;Knight 1990;Welch 1986) and the distri- bution of exotic status markers to secondary mound sites in order to secure regional status positions (Peebles 1983). The mound sites that adjoined the population centers appear to have been largely ceremonial, administrative, or religious in nature. However, Johnson (1994: 114) contends that "the common folk may have gotten more than reli- gious advice and alliances from the elites, for there is some evidence…that corn was stockpiled at the major centers presumably to carry the general populace through years of bad crops." Barker (1992: 68) argues that such hoarding was more than likely used to foster a system for the legitimacy of elites and soli- darity between them and the commoners. There is also support for the idea that it may have lessened intertribal conflict during lean times. In fact, Milner, Anderson, and Smith (1991) argue that the system mediated local conflict in a number of ways. In parts of the system-and this appears to have been par- ticularly true in the South Appalachian area-complex chiefdoms may have emerged as a way of combining defensive forces against common enemies, per- haps other but stronger Mississippians (Larson 1980). Whereas a purely kin-based system would have been characterized by status differences related to kinship, the Mississippian system differed in that the hierarchical class structure and status groups were almost certainly impor- tant in structuring local relations of social control (Mehrer and Collins 1995). Consequently, it has been argued that the Mississippians could reasonably be identified as the beginning of a class system that might, if left uninterrupted, have led to the development of a state mechanism (Carneiro 1981;Pauketat 1994). In the Mississippian culture, paramount chiefs also exercised ceremo- nial, political, economic, and administrative control over villages that were often separated by great distances (Hudson 1990). As an example, the Coosas of Georgia dominated and exacted tribute from less-powerful bands throughout eastern Tennessee, northeastern Alabama, and northern Georgia. The Lady of Cofitachequi in what is now South Carolina exercised authority over a dozen or more lesser chiefdoms located from the coast far into the Blue Ridge mountains (Hudson 1976). The archaeological evidence suggests that these relationships were cemented with trade and social relations between remote local chiefdoms and powerful paramount chiefdoms which involved payment of tribute, 'down- the-line' exchange, and powerful ideology necessary to subordinate and secure the allegiance of lesser and often distant chiefs (Pauketat 1994;Pauketat and Emerson 1997). This also may well have been the case with mortuary rituals and other burial practices performed throughout the system and associated prised of perhaps a small village or some number of farmsteads surrounded by uninhabited buffer zones (Scarry 1996a). These social formations differed in a number of ways from complex chiefdoms, which emerged when a powerful chief 's sphere of authority expanded sufficiently so that he or she came to exer- cise direct or indirect control over one or more other simple ...