Measuring Chickasaw Adaptation on the Western Frontier of the Colonial South: A Correlation of Documentary and Archaeological Data

The restudy of archived site collections allows the seriation of pit features from several colonial period Chickasaw sites in northeastern Mississippi. The result is a fine-grained chronology which allows the relationship between the archaeological record and the documentary record to be examined in unusual detail. Documenting changes in the faunal, ceramic, and lithic assemblages which occurred between 1650 and 1750, it is clear that while the Chickasaw were quick to take advantage of the economic opportunities made possible by their position at the intersection of colonial ambitions, they were slow to replace traditional technology with trade goods. Ceramic data provide information on relationships between the Chickasaws and their neighbors, and these external relationships shifted through time, displaying a pattern which was structured by internal social organization and traditional offices. There can be no question that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a time of radical change in the lives of native peoples of the Southeast. Indians and European colonists were in a state of continual adjustment in order to take advantage of the economic and political opportunities of a rapidly changing social and cultural landscape. Several factors combine to make the Chickasaw of northeastern Mississippi an excellent case study for understanding the early colonial period in the South. To begin with, considerable archaeological research has focused on the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Chickasaw villages located within the city limits of present-day Tupelo in northeastern Mississippi (Figure 1). Early excavations by Henry Collins in 1937, Moreau Chambers in 1937, and Jesse Jennings in 1939, were directed toward determining whether MLel4 (22Le524) was the village of Ackia which the French attacked in 1736 (Brown 2004). After concluding that MLel4 was not Ackia, Jennings (1941, 1944) went on to direct Albert Spalding in the excavation of other Chickasaw villages in preparation for the construction of the Natchez Trace Parkway. Among the sites investigated for the parkway construction were MLel6 (no state site number, located somewhere on Beldon Ridge between Silver City and MLe90 [Figure I]), MLeIS (22Le504), and MLe90 (22Le505). In addition to Jennings's reports on this work, James Atkinson (1985, 1987) used the collections from these sites in combination with surface collections and other material from the Chickasaw region to make significant advances in our understanding of Chickasaw archaeology. In 1955, a naturalist working for the National Park Service (Elmore 1955) salvaged material from the Futorian site (MLell2/22Le556), a Chickasaw village that was being destroyed by the construction of a furniture plant. Johnson et al. (1994) used the material from this site in a study focusing primarily on the presence of bison bones in Chickasaw sites dating from the late sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in Mississippi. The 1990s saw a good deal of contract archaeology which focused on historic period Chickasaw sites in the Tupelo region. Four sites were dug, beginning with the Meadowbrook site (22Le912) in 1990. This site had been badly disturbed by terracing and erosion and most of the material was recovered from relatively deep burial pits (Johnson et al. 1994; Yearous 1991). The Orchard site (22Le519) was also excavated in 1990, and analyses of portions of the collection from that site have been published (Blake 1992; Breitburg 1997; Johnson 1997). The Silver City site (22Le520) is located nearby, and one large midden pit from that site was excavated in 1996 in preparation for the construction of a Tennessee Valley Authority building (Wild 1997). Finally, in 1996, John O'Hear directed the largest of the recent excavations of a Chickasaw village, the Immokakina'Fa' site (22Le907), in south Tupelo (O'Hear and Ryba 1998). O'Hear's preliminary analysis of five large pit features at Immokakina'Fa' inspired this investigation because it underscored the opportunity that such features offer in studying the early historic period Chickasaw (O'Hear 2000). …