Coles Creek fauna procurement strategies: subsistence diversity among late prehistoric hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists in the Lower Mississippi Valley

ABSTRACT

In the late 1980s, a collaborative effort between Harvard University’s Lower Mississippi Survey and Tulane University’s Center for Archaeology launched a study examining the causes and consequences of subsistence change in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The Osceola Project contributed the first formal study of late prehistoric faunal remains within the Alluvial Plain, becoming the standard against which all subsequent Coles Creek faunal assemblages have been measured. Recent evidence recovered from three sites located in the Eastern Uplands presented the opportunity to compare and contrast vertebrate subsistence in these two distinct physiographic regions. We hypothesize that a clear distinction exists between lowland and upland Coles Creek procurement strategies. This article evaluates this claim by examining species diversity, spatial patterns, and temporal trends evident within an eight-site sample. The results suggest that the primary factor influencing Coles Creek fauna procurement was the immediate environment, and that the composition of Late Woodland period diets may be a reflection of efficiency of effort rather than food access or scarcity.

KEYWORDS:

• Lower Mississippi Valley
• Coles Creek
• faunal analysis
• subsistence strategy
• upland/lowland procurement

Acknowledgments

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 73rd annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Athens, Georgia, as part of an organized Coles Creek archaeology symposium. We would like to thank Ed Jackson and Susan Scott for their extraordinary assistance and for granting us access to the comparative collection housed at the University of Southern Mississippi. We would also like to express our gratitude to Ian W. Brown, William Dressler, Ed Jackson, and Jessica Kowalski for their careful reading of an earlier draft of the article. Their comments greatly improved the clarity and quality of the final version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniel A. LaDu is a staff archaeologist with Panamerican Consultants, Inc. (PCI) and a part-time teaching instructor with the University of Alabama’s Department of Anthropology. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina (2007) and his Master’s (2009) and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees (2016) at the University of Alabama, specializing in the archaeology of complex societies. He has more than a decade of major archaeological experience, both prehistoric and historic, in Alabama, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and is the author of The Mazique Site: A Balmoral Phase Coles Creek Mound and Plaza Center in the Natchez Bluffs Region of Mississippi.

J. Lynn Funkhouser is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. She is an instructor in the Department of Anthropology and serves as the coordinator of graduate training for the University of Alabama Graduate School. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology at Middle Tennessee State University (2008) and her Master of Arts degree in anthropology from the University of Southern Mississippi (2014). Ms. Funkhouser is a Registered Professional Archaeologist (RPA) specializing in bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology of the Woodland through Colonial periods.

Notes

1 Also known as the Fatherland site (22AD501), the Grand Village was the capital of the Natchez polity between 1682 and 1729 (Neitzel 1965, 1983).

2 No bear remains were reported from Lake Providence or Shackleford Lake, although a great deal of large mammal bone at these sites could not be assigned to a specific species.

3 This is also the time of the year when bear cubs were taken from their mothers (Swanton 1911:67–68; Wilson 1977:Figure 8).

4 Due to the temperate climate and year-round availability of food in the Southeast, black bears do not truly hibernate in the LMV. They undergo a more moderate form of winter dormancy termed “carnivorean lethargy.” As a result, their seasonal weight gain trends toward the lower end of the range (Smith 1975:116, 118; Wooding and Hardisky 1992).

5 Given the limitations in the extant published data, we consider these phases jointly.

6 The Smith Creek assemblage was not included in the correspondence analyses examining Coles Creek phases, because research there remains ongoing (Megan C. Kassabaum, personal communication 2017).