Sourcing galena from a Middle Woodland habitation site in northeast Mississippi

ABSTRACT

Galena has been recovered mostly in mortuary contexts – burial mounds, burial caves, and associated mortuary facilities – from Middle Woodland sites in the Southeast. Three small pieces of galena from the Cork site (22OK746) in northeast Mississippi came from midden deposits at a site with no mound or burials. Lead isotope analysis was used to source the samples to the Central Missouri-Tri-State-North Arkansas region. Isotopes provide an excellent sourcing method because their ratios are stable and large comparative source datasets are available. Recovery bias may have led to underestimation of galena presence in Middle Woodland habitation sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Galena sourcing
• Middle Woodland period
• Mississippi
• lead isotope analysis

Acknowledgments

John Underwood, chief archaeologist at the Mississippi Department of Transportation, gave permission for minimally destructive analysis of the Cork site galena samples. We thank Jeffrey Alvey and Evan Peacock (Mississippi State University) for their help in creating the maps, and two anonymous reviewers for providing useful comments.

Data availability statement

The collections from the Cork site are currently housed at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University. They ultimately will be curated by the Mississippi Department of Transportation, Jackson, Mississippi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Janet Rafferty holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her interests include evolutionary explanation, settlement pattern change, and seriation method.

Virginie Renson holds a PhD in Science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels (Belgium). She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Reactor Center at the University of Missouri. Her current research focuses on chemistry-based provenance determination in geoarchaeology.

ORCID

Janet Rafferty http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8625-2687

Additional information

Funding

The acquisition of the Nu Plasma II MC-ICP-MS at MURR was funded by the National Science Foundation (grant# BCS-0922374). Fieldwork at the Cork site and analysis of artifacts was performed under Contract No. 79-0018-03-018-10 with the Mississippi Department of Transportation. S. Homes Hogue, now Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, served as co-PI on the project.