Figure 1 - uploaded by Susan Alt
Content may be subject to copyright.
5. Reconstruction of a Mississippian-style pole-and-thatch house built with wall trenches. University of Illinois, 2001.
Source publication
In the middle of the eleventh century, just as Europe entered its High Middle Ages, North American Indians in the Mississippi River valley began building their first true city, a place now called Cahokia (plate 1). Soon, new capital towns sprang up throughout what is now the U.S. Southeast. Over each place towered from one to as many as two hundred...
Citations
... The 500 years prior to the arrival of European colonists marked a time of tremendous social complexity through the Eastern Woodlands of what is now the United States. Known as the Mississippian period, this time period spanned from A.D. 900-1600 and was characterized by agricultural crop production, nucleated settlements, and earthen platform mounds surrounded by plazas, shared iconography, and shell-tempered ceramic technology (King and Meyers 2002;Koerner 2005;Pauketat and Alt 2015;Schroedl et al. 1990;Smith 1986). Mississippian people lived in a large area which spanned across the interior Southeast, into the Midwest, the southern mid-Atlantic region, and reached as far west as the eastern Great Plains (Cobb 2003;Payne and Scarry 1998;Steponaitis 1986). ...
In bioarchaeological contexts involving interpretations of impairment and disability, scholars can benefit by engaging with the literature from other fields, particularly Disability Studies (DS), to better understand the complexities and nuances of these terms. In this chapter, definitions of impairment and disability are introduced from a number of perspectives, including academic scholarship, as well the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). While impairment has typically been identified by bioarchaeologists as paleopathological in nature, some frameworks from DS expand this definition to include social components. The nuances of these terms are applied to an archaeological case study from a Mississippian site in East Tennessee and describe the remains of a woman who presented a lifelong musculoskeletal impairment of her upper and lower limbs. This impairment would have restricted her ability to move around the landscape in the same way as her peers. Despite these physical differences, her mortuary treatment was not markedly different from other members in her community and does not appear to fit a recent definition of deviant burial practices proposed by Tsaliki (2008). While mortuary data are vital to better understand impairment and disability in the past, bioarchaeologists must be careful to not over interpret the subtle, and simultaneously, marked differences between these two concepts.
