num_pages: 0
description: At the time of Spanish contact in A.D. 1540 the Mississippian inhabitants of the great valley in northwestern Georgia and adjacent portions of Alabama and Tennessee were organized into a number of chiefdoms distributed along the Coosa and Tennessee rivers and their major tributaries. The administrative centers of these polities were large settlements with one or more platform mounds and plazas. Each had a large resident population but most polity members lived in a half dozen or so towns located within a day's walk of the center. This book is about one such town located on the Coosa River in Georgia and known to archaeologists as the King site. The King site represents a nearly ideal opportunity to identify the kinds of status positions that were held by individual inhabitants; analyze individual households and investigate the roles they played in King site society; reconstruct the community that existed at King including size life history symbolic associations and integrative mechanisms; and place King in the larger regional political system. With excavations dating back to 1973 and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Geographic Society this is social archaeology at its best.
language: English
title: King: The Social Archaeology of a Late Mississippian Town in Northwestern Georgia
publisher: University of Alabama Press