Rethinking Mississippian copper symbol badges: two previously unreported examples from east Alabama

ABSTRACT

Traditional interpretation of Mississippian copper symbol badges is that they were prestige items associated with both inherited and earned status. In this article we review the current state of knowledge regarding copper symbol badges, introduce two previously unreported examples from the Big Tallassee (1MC1) and Abercrombie (1RU61) sites, and propose a new interpretation for the circulation and disposition of copper symbol badges during the Mississippian and Protohistoric periods. We argue that these objects were initially incorporated into headdresses (worn in both life and death) at major Mississippian towns and then were later transformed into inalienable possessions associated with particular beings, people, or places as large polities collapsed and new political entities were formed.

KEYWORDS:

• Mississippian period
• copper
• circulation
• exchange

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Alabama Department of Archives and History (especially Raven Christopher and Kellie Bowers) for access to the copper symbol badge in their collection; Danielle Cook at Columbus State University for access to Frank Schnell’s manuscripts on file in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences; Erik Porth for sharing his photo of the Moundville pendant; the University of Alabama Museums (Mark Donop and Bill Allen) and the Florida Division of Historic Resources (Sam Wilford) for permission to use images of copper emblems from nonburial contexts. Thank you to Christopher Berk and Savannah Newell for acting as sounding boards during the process of writing this article. An Auburn University College of Liberal Arts New Faculty Summer Research Grant provided the funds and time for Buchanan to conduct research on the Big Tallassee collection. Three peer reviewers provided helpful feedback and this article is all the better for it. All mistakes and omissions are the fault of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on the contributors

Meghan E. Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Auburn University. Her research interests include Mississippian societies, conflict and warfare, socio-political collapse and resilience, and collections management and curation.

Rob Bonney is a retired Physician Assistant and an avid avocational archaeologist with primary interest in the Mississippian Period Southeast, particularly Mississippian ceramics in central Alabama.

Data availability statement

Data was compiled from the references cited in Table 1 and throughout the article. Unpublished notes from Cottier are maintained by the Auburn University Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work.

Notes

1 Members of the Alabama Anthropological Society believed that the Alabama River valley site in Montgomery County they called Toasi (also referred to as Tuasi, Towasi, or Towasa) was the village of Tuasi visited by the Soto entrada (Brannon 1921b). Current reconstructions of the Soto route place Tuasi in northeast Alabama along the Coosa River (e.g., Jenkins and Sheldon 2016:Figure 2), not the Alabama River in Montgomery County. Modern Montgomery County is located in the polity of Tascalusa (Regnier 2014). The site of Toasi that contained the copper symbol badge is on the Frank D. Kohn Plantation (Burnham 1921a:81). Today, that property is part of the Maxwell Air Force Base and site 1MT200 on the property is “Towassa.” The site is listed in the Alabama Online Cultural Resources Database as having shell-tempered pottery suggesting a Mississippian occupation. However, the only temporal affiliation listed in the site files is Historic Creek.

The association of the copper symbol badge from the C. R. Jones collection (Brannon 1921a) with the Crenshaw Cemetery or Crenshaw Mound site is tentative. No provenience information is provided with the drawing and description of the copper symbol badge. However, all additional descriptions of C. R. Jones’s collections in subsequent volumes of Arrow Points (e.g., Brannon 1921b, 1922) specify his collections came from the Crenshaw site. Burnham’s (1921b) discussion of Montgomery County mounds describes the location of Crenshaw as “two miles, west by south, of the mouth of Line Creek.” There are two known sites in the general vicinity of Burnham’s description: 1MT4/48 (Jenkin’s Farm) and 1MT2/73. 1MT4/48 was known to members of the Alabama Anthropological Society as the Cowles Bend site, and Burnham (1921b) clearly identified Crenshaw and Cowles Bend as different sites in his Montgomery mounds survey. 1MT2/73 is listed in the Alabama Online Cultural Resources Database as a mound site with shell-tempered pottery. We suggest that Jones and Burnham’s Crenshaw Cemetery/Mound is 1MT2 and was the likely source for the copper symbol badge.

2 The discovery of the burial association occurred during the course of this research. Due to the NAGPRA implications of this copper symbol badge, we will not include photographs or drawings of the object and due to the sensitive nature of these objects, we do not include photos of any copper badge/pendants that were recovered from burials.

Additional information

Funding

An Auburn University College of Liberal Arts New Faculty Summer Research Grant provided funding for Buchanan to conduct research.