of Mulberry Creek Plain along with minority rep- resentations of Wright Check Stamped, Pickwick Complicated Stamped, and Bluff Creek Simple Stamped. Walthall (1980) characterized the assem- blages of Flint River culture in Northern Alabama as predominated by Mulberry Creek Plain and Flint River Brushed, whereas limestone-tempered cord-marked ceramics were important constitu- ents of Late Woodland McKelvey assemblages in the Tennessee Valley of eastern Tennessee (Walthall 1980:137). During the Late Woodland, a major techno- logical change is signaled by the introduction of bow-and-arrow technology into the region during the Late Woodland (Blitz 1988). In the western por- tion of the middle Tennessee Valley, the dominance of grog-tempered ceramics distinguishes Late and Terminal Woodland assemblages from those in the eastern portion of the valley, which were predomi- nantly limestone tempered (Walthall 1980). 3.4 Mississippian (800 to 1600 A.D.) Current researchers concur that populations as- sociated with Mississippian stage manifestations throughout southeastern North America were set aside from earlier ones by the development of in- stitutionalized social inequality (Smith 1990). Maize agriculture appears to have been an important sub- sistence component for most Mississippian societies (Scarry 1993). Pole-framed public and domestic structures were often rectangular and sometimes employed wattle-and-daub wall construction. A central plaza surrounded by mounds and public and domestic structures characterized some of the larger Mississippian communities (Lewis and Stout 1998). Some Mississippian sites also were fortified with palisade walls and bastions and sometimes defen- sive ditches or moats, as well (e.g., Knight and Ste- ponaitis 1998; Schroedl 1998). Regional settlement studies typically reflect a site hierarchy consisting of mound centers and outlying nonmound sites (Blitz and Lorenz 2006). Specially crafted artifacts often made of extralocal materials furnish evidence of widespread interregional exchange (Brown 2004). The existence of far-reaching Mississippian alliances in the interior Southeast was documented at the time of initial European contact.
The Hooper site (40DV234) in Davidson Coun- ty is a Mississippian village containing 53 stone box graves (Smith and Moore 1996). The minimum number of individuals (MNI) recovered was 66, which included adults, children, and infants. Buri- als followed three practices: a central cemetery for adults, family plots adjacent to houses, and infants and children buried within house floors (Smith and Moore 1996:10). The Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto (1539 to 1543) represents the earliest recorded European contact with native populations in the interior of southeastern North America. In the 1560s, the Tristan de Luna and Juan Pardo expeditions revis- ited some of the areas in the interior traversed by the earlier de Soto entrada. By almost all archaeological accounts, widespread and extensive depopulation followed in the wake of the sixteenth-century Span- ish incursions into the Southeast, and there was a concomitant disintegration of Mississippian polities accompanied by migrations and coalescence of na- tive groups throughout much of the region. While some have pointed out that these years have been largely neglected by historians and referred to them as the forgotten centuries. Robbie Ethridge (2009) has subsequently illuminated some of these shad- owy times with her conception of the Mississippian shatter zone, i.e., a region of widespread social and political transformations of native groups, presum- ably related to internecine warfare and slave trade with Europeans. 3.5 Post-Contact Native American (1560 to 1860) In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the British, French, and Spaniards com- peted for control over broad regions of the South- east. Increasing participation in nascent European capitalist markets through deerskin and peltry trade contributed to extensive transformations of native groups during the colonial era (Braund 1993). The influx of European settlers into the region spurred the forced cession of Cherokee lands, and as a result, the Overhill Cherokees moved from their tradition- al lands into what is today southeastern Tennessee (Abram 2013a, 2013b). Typically, Overhill Cherokee assemblages are characterized by shell- or grit-tem-
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