Publications

Schroeder, Sissel
2006 Walls as Symbols of Political, Economic, and Military Might. In Leadership and Polity in Mississippian Society, edited by Brian M. Butler and Paul D. Welch, pp. 115-141. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

---

During the eleventh century A.D., the frequency with which stout walls were constructed around settlements began to increase across the Eastern Woodlands. While some of the large Mississippian mound sites in the Southeast and southern Midwest were protected with substantial enclosures studded with bastions, other mound sites lacked these features. Typically associated with warfare, such walls reflect vertical integration involving regional elites as they vied for adherents, struggled to establish and maintain alliances, cultivated and enhanced the sanctity of chiefly office, and attempt- ed to augment their prestige and expand their spheres of influence through the use of coercive force and the construction of monuments; the walls also manifest horizontal forms of integration involving followers and allies who weighed the benefits and costs associated with a loss of autonomy in such a contentious social landscape. The implications of village fortification for the ascent, attrition, transformation, and eventual dissolution of chiefly power are explored using a case example from the lower Tennessee River valley in western Kentucky.

---

 

Schroeder, Sissel
2004 Current Research on Late Precontact Societies of the Midcontinental United StatesJournal of Archaeological Research 12(4):311-372.

---

Research during the past decade on Late Precontact societies (ca. A.D. 1000– 1600/1700) in the Midcontinent, particularly Mississippian, Oneota, Fort Ancient, and Late Woodland, is strongly rooted in empirical approaches. While some of this work is pursued within a broadly evolutionary interpretive framework, other scholars emphasize agency and practice theory, symbolism, the historically contingent nature of human action, and cultural heterogeneity in sociopolitical organization, political economy, and subsistence. Dynamic models of the settlement systems and demography of complex societies have developed out of the recent growth in site inventories and refinements in ceramic chronologies and have come to be closely linked with theoretical treatments of sociopolitical organization. Various physical and chemical analytical techniques are commonly applied to the analysis of archaeological materials in this region, contributing to our understanding of direct and indirect exchange relationships and other forms of interaction, especially those between hierarchical and nonhierarchically organized societies, and enhancing our understanding of the kinds of foods prepared and eaten by people in the past.

---