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Big Pots for Big Shots: Feasting and Storage in a Mississippian Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John H. Blitz
John H. Blitz*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME 04011
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Abstract

In small-scale societies, ritual feasts are often an important setting for social integration and status competition. Material evidence of feasting and food storage may be preserved in community ceremonial precincts, such as platform mounds. To identify food-consumption activities, ceramic samples from mound and village contexts at the prehistoric Lubbub Creek site in Alabama are compared. There are no significant differences in the distribution of decorated types, ware categories, or vessel shapes. However, the mound has a more restricted range of vessel sizes and disproportionately larger vessels than the village sample. These results, together with supporting feature and faunal data, suggest that mound activities included large-group feasts and food storage.

Resumen

Resumen

En las sociedades de menor escala, los festejos rituales son frecuentemente un escenario importante para la integración social y competitión de status. Restos arqueológicos de festejos y almacenaje de alimentos pueden ser preservados en zonas ceremoniales de la comunidad, por ejemplo en los montículos. Para identificar las actividades de alimentación, se comparan muestras de cerámica procedente del montículo y del pueblo con la del sitio prehistórico de Lubbub Creek en el estado de Alabama. No hay una diferencia significante en la distribución de tipos de decoración, la categoriá de fabricatión, ni de las formas de las vasijas. Sin embargo, el montículo tiene una escalá mas restringida en lo que se refiere a los tamaños de las vasijas y tiene un número desproporcionado de vasijas maás grandes que las muestras encontradas en el pueblo. Estas vasijas grandes son evidencia de grandes festejos y el almacenaje de comida. Los restos óseos también apoyan esta misma interpretación.

Type
Reports
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 1993 , pp. 80 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1993

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