Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar
312
Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar
312Overview
Archaeologists and architects draw upon theoretical perspectives from their fields to provide valuable insights into the structure, development, and meaning of prehistoric communities.
Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. The built environment envelops our lives and projects our distinctive regional and ethnic identities to the world around us. Archaeology and architecture find common theoretical ground in their perspectives of the homes, spaces, and communities that people create for themselves. Although archaeologists and architects may ask different questions and apply different methods, the results are the same—a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
In this volume, prominent archaeologists examine the architectural design spaces of Mississippian towns and mound centers of the eastern United States. The diverse Mississippian societies, which existed between A.D. 900 and 1700, created some of the largest and most complex Native American archaeological sites in the United States. The dominant architectural feature shared by these communities was one or more large plazas, each of which was often flanked by buildings set on platform mounds. The authors describe the major dimensions of an architectural grammar, centered on the design of the plaza and mound complex that was shared by different societies across the Mississippian world. They then explore these shared architectural features as physical representations or metaphors for Mississippian world views and culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817384685 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
R. Barry Lewis is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. Charles Stout is Director of Development and Assessments, The Quantum Muse Company.
Read an Excerpt
Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces
Searching for an Architectural GrammarThe University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1998 The University of Alabama PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-0947-3
Chapter One
The Design of Mississippian TownsR. Barry Lewis, Charles Stout, and Cameron B. Wesson
Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. As such, it encodes much information about a society-political organization, economy, subsistence, aesthetics, cosmology, and gender relations, to list only a few topics-and the limits of this information expand as we learn more about the dynamic relationships between people and their environments. Archaeological investigations seek to decode this information and reconstruct the cultural meanings assigned to architecture by the men and women who created it.
Stella Kramisch (1976), in the preface to her book The Hindu Temple, writes, "The Hindu temple is the sum total of architectural rites performed on the basis of its myth. The myth covers the ground and is the plan on which the structure is raised." This statement captures the essence and spirit of one new direction in which studies of prehistoric American architecture are moving. This book also steps in that direction. Some of the chapters move boldly; others may appear tentative, but together they advance a view of the larger late prehistoric communities of the midwestern and southeastern UnitedStates that is more centered on a search for meanings than on settlement patterns and site function. Like Kramisch, we (Lewis, Stout, and Wesson) believe that the architecture we study reflects design decisions that were based on widely shared meanings. This assertion is, in itself, unremarkable, but having to reconcile it with the fact that the architectural similarities of town planning in the Mississippian world transcended linguistic and cultural boundaries as substantial as the differences between medieval Poland and Spain makes it of considerable research interest.
This book is motivated primarily by the hypothesis that the design of Mississippian towns was ritually prescribed. Following (and rephrasing) Kramisch, we believe that each Mississippian town site owes its general design to the sum total of architectural rites performed on the basis of its myth. The myth covered the ground and was the plan on which the town was raised. Our goal is to understand the congruencies of design in time and space, the main elements of the designs, how and why these congruencies existed, and the regional variants and, generally, to begin to answer questions about these towns that consider them more as communities than as archaeological sites, settlement patterns, site plans, or excavations.
As one might expect, we are only partly successful in reaching our goal. To anticipate our conclusions, this book describes and examines the elements of a Mississippian architectural grammar. We find it easier to trace the major dimensions of this grammar across space than through archaeological time. It is unlikely that a coherent town plan "myth," formalized in the same sense as the shastras that guide the construction of Kramisch's Hindu temples, existed consciously in the Mississippian world except perhaps at the most superficial level. Nevertheless, a shared architectural grammar is both sufficient and necessary to account for the observed patterning.
So what is an architectural grammar and why should we concern ourselves with it? A fundamental distinction to be made here is between an architectural grammar and an architectural style. Both address the same phenomena, but an architectural grammar focuses on the rules by which elements were combined in architectural expression, while an architectural style emphasizes the classification of compositions by their shared expressions. Classification is an important component of the research described here, but only as a means to an end. Our definition of architectural grammar is similar to that of Mitchell (1990). Like him, we assume that "design worlds may be specified by formal grammars" (Mitchell 1990:x). Even in cases such as the Mississippian town, about which very little is known, there is much to be learned by delineating fundamental design relationships.
To further explain what is meant by an architectural grammar requires that we reaffirm the obvious-but not the obviously trivial. Although interesting in their own right, architecture and settlement patterns cannot be divorced from the unique cultural contexts in which they were formed. And, while it is usually impossible to learn language, economics, cosmology, or other complex cultural phenomena from direct analyses of a society's architecture, these other systems are often revealed indirectly by their articulation with constructed forms. This, therefore, is the argument of architectural relevance: architecture is one instrument, of widely accepted face and criterion validity, by which we may compare the differences and similarities of societies through time and across space.
To build on this argument, but still stay close to the obvious, it is also uncontroversial to assert that all societies assign meaning to spaces that denote, connote, or secure privacy; that segment activities; that expose or elaborate openness; and that convey water, people, or machines. They appropriate hills, trees, bushes, bluffs, and rockshelters to serve as walls, fences, hedgerows, screens, and homes. They create landscapes filled with terraces, pits, roads, bridges, canals, aqueducts, and other socially defined spaces in places where nature did not provide them.
One important dimension of the latter behavior is the anticipation of future use. The elements of cultural landscapes are of differential duration. Some spaces, such as campsites, may be both architecturally simple and of short duration. Spaces that are designed to be used for long intervals tend to be more architecturally complex and show a greater investment of time and effort in their construction. This is the argument of design intent: the architectural complexity of cultural spaces tends to vary directly with the cultural "memory" of these spaces. This argument, or more accurately this relationship, was one of the more fruitful ideas underlying the settlement pattern studies of the 1960s and 1970s. It is yet another instrument by which we may reconstruct and compare cultural landscapes.
Finally, if we glance again at design intent, we also can see that architectural complexity cannot be divorced entirely from considerations of function. Societies generally prescribe the design of long-term structures and sites so that they can serve multiple complementary ends. Witness the Khyber railway line booking office blueprint that identified one of the rooms as a "Combined Booking Office Window and Machine Gun Loophole" (Aitken 1995:25). The general idea, which seems to be true cross-culturally, is the more features that are included in a design, the more functional the space becomes, but only if the features are well integrated and only if there are no more than a few main features. The inherent limits of spatial functionality are quickly reached. A few minutes spent with any of the world's baroque styles-or in trying to adapt a church's "multipurpose room" to do what you really need (perhaps we could call this a faroque space, one with an over-elaboration of assigned functions)-is sufficient to demonstrate that the relationship between architectural complexity and designed functions is everywhere nonlinear. This aspect of design intent we call the argument of functional limits: the number of designed functions increases in a nonlinear, but asymptotic relationship with architectural complexity.
If we step beyond a consideration of limitations on the objects of architectural design to the contexts of designs, we must come to terms with the cultural meanings of exterior space or setting, that which lies outside of the domain of a given design, but which stands in the same relationship to it as does a vase to a rose bud (or, depending on your mood, an alley to a garbage can). A problem here is to capture accurate cultural meanings but also to avoid infinite regress. Were the design limits of a Mississippian town the mound-and-plaza complex, the palisade, the outermost cluster of houses, the outlying fields, or the homes of everyone who viewed himself or herself as a member of that town, and so on? To push the question into our world, where does Chicago really end? At the Loop? The Cook County line? Joliet? The answers to these questions require that we understand both the objects of design and their contexts. This is the argument of architectural context: a given design cannot be understood in cultural terms if you divorce it from its context; the setting of a design is as much a cultural artifact as is the building, space, or landscape itself.
With these ideas in hand, we can now develop the notion of an architectural grammar. Just as language is imposed order on selected sounds, the grammar of human constructions and appropriations is ordered by design intents, functional limits, and contexts. Like language, which takes as elements those vocalizations that can be readily recognized and generated by humans, architecture arranges such elements as visual images, colors, shapes, materials, textures, and motives in terms that are culturally meaningful and interactive with the environment. Architecture often even arranges odors and sounds, making the desirable more noticeable and the unwanted as invisible as possible. As a society builds upon its architecture, its own accidental and historical additions and nuances become part of a distinctive, but changing lexicon. It is this architectural grammar, the instances of which recall Rouse's (1939) procedural modes, that we seek to capture in our investigation of Mississippian towns. We use the architectural grammar notion as a heuristic, not, as Mitchell (1990) has done, to construct a critical language about designs. Although we are interested in pursuing the latter, it is a goal feasible only in the long term.
The remainder of this chapter introduces the reader to the history of research on Mississippian architecture and the major elements of Mississippian town design. We conclude with a brief guide map to the book's organization.
Architecture of Mississippian Towns and Mound Centers
The fundamental architecture of built communities in the southeastern United States between the tenth and seventeenth centuries A.D. is clearly distinguishable from that of societies in other places and times. This unifying system arose from the collective cultural histories and natural environments of the many distinct peoples who are now lumped together by archaeologists under the rubric of "Mississippian culture" (Figure 1.1). The main architectural elements include plazas, platform mounds and other earthworks, entryways, various means of segregating space and activities, defensive works, and natural terrain features (Figure 1.2).
Out of this context, archaeologists have, thus far, extracted only the major spatial and temporal patterns by which these elements were melded together to create spaces that were socially meaningful in the Mississippian world. Among these patterns are towns and mound centers. We define a Mississippian town as a habitation center with a public area, such as a plaza or courtyard, that may be flanked by one or more mounds. Many archaeologists who study the Mississippi period also recognize mound centers, which are planned sites with earthworks but little or no archaeological evidence of habitation. The term ceremonial center has also been applied to most Mississippian towns and mound centers. We believe that the latter label, and those like it, are misleading in that they emphasize only one functional aspect of these complex sites. It is unlikely that any town or mound center existed only for ceremonial uses, just as it is quite likely that Mississippian rituals and ceremonies were carried out at sites that lacked mounds and plazas. In our view, at least, Mississippian earthworks and plazas were a sufficient but not a necessary condition of rituals in the Mississippian world. The label "ceremonial center," therefore, is as meaningless when applied to Mississippian towns and mound centers as would be such labels as "trade center," "habitation center," "administrative center," "defensive center," and "storage center."
The two major information sources for Mississippian town planning are, first, the narratives of early European and American explorers (e.g., Adair 1986; Bartram 1996; Clayton, Knight, and Moore 1993; d'Iberville 1981; Le Page du Pratz 1972; Pénicaut 1988) and, second, archaeological investigations. The ethnohistorical accounts provide rich contextual information about these towns and how they were used. Nevertheless, it is corroboration by the physical evidence, which only archaeology can provide, that gives these accounts true interpretive value.
Mississippian town planning has been studied by archaeologists for more than a century and a half. Early surveys of earthworks, such as those by Squier and Davis (1848), Thomas (1894), and Potter (1880), helped to identify the main features of Mississippian towns and mound centers throughout the Southeast. The first systematic examination of Mississippian site design patterns did not come, however, until shortly after World War II when Phillips, Ford, and Griffin (1951:309-44) described and analyzed a taxonomy of sites in the first major report of the Harvard Peabody Museum's Lower Mississippi Survey. Their taxonomy recognized villages without mounds, sites with one or more conical burial mounds, small ceremonial centers with rectangular mounds, large ceremonial centers with rectangular mounds, large rectangular villages with temple mounds (St. Francis type), large irregular villages with rectangular mounds, and sites too damaged to classify (Phillips, Ford, and Griffin 1951:310-35).
In general, Phillips, Ford, and Griffin (1951) described a Mississippian town design pattern that was already well known to other southeastern archaeologists. The big difference between what Phillips, Ford, and Griffin did and what researchers like Thomas and Potter were able to accomplish was that Phillips and his coworkers had a much better command of the temporal dimension of their data. Their main contribution was to pull together the first systematic look at the dynamics of site planning in one region of the prehistoric Southeast. They described a pattern in which mounds, when present at a Mississippian site, are found along the edges of a central plaza. When there is more than one mound, the axes of the mounds usually are parallel with the plaza's axis. Commonly, one of the mounds that flank the plaza is larger than the others. Often, the plaza lies to the east or southeast of this "primary" mound.
Study of the design patterns described by Phillips, Ford, and Griffin and their predecessors has dominated subsequent examinations of Mississippian architecture and settlement patterning. For example, Reed (1977), Wahls (1986), and most recently Payne (1994) have explored the alignments of Mississippian mounds with respect to plazas and nearby rivers and found a close relationship between plaza alignments and the courses of adjacent rivers. Morgan (1980), an architect, also examined these and many other aspects of Mississippian settlement patterns and design elements in an ambitious but visually outstanding study of prehistoric earth architecture in the eastern United States.
Other studies, such as Sullivan's (1987, 1995) investigation of the Mouse Creek site in eastern Tennessee and Mehrer's (1988, 1995; Mehrer and Collins 1995) research on American Bottom hinterland communities in western Illinois, trace the relationships between the evolution of villages into towns and the interrelated effects of this transition on households and site plans. Williams's (1995) look at "chiefly compounds" in Georgia addresses questions about population estimates and community composition and concludes that most Mississippian societies in the Southeast basically had a two-tiered settlement system of compounds or sites with various numbers of farmsteads, with rare exceptions like Cahokia and Etowah, which were large and more complex.
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Table of Contents
Contents Figures and Tables Preface Acknowledgments 1. The Design of Mississippian Towns 2. Town Structure at the Edge of the Mississippian World 3. The Nature of Mississippian Towns in Georgia: The King Site Example 4. Mississippian Towns in the Eastern Tennessee Valley 5. Mississippian Sacred Landscapes: The View from Alabama 6. Mississippi Period Mound Groups and Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley 7. Mississippian Towns in Kentucky 8. Towns along the Lower Ohio 9. The Mississippian Town Plan and Cultural Landscape of Cahokia, Illinois 10. The Town as Metaphor References Cited Contributors IndexRelated Subjects
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