Cooking Pots as Burial Urns

Abstract

Large ceramic vessels used as burial urns occasionally have been found in Late Mississippian/protohistoric contexts in Alabama and Mississippi. Ethnohistorical documents suggest that large vessels were used for cooking in a domestic context. A systematic examination of three urns from east-central Mississippi shows multiple uses prior to their final deposition with burials. Vessel size analysis of a temporal sequence of sherds from midden contexts used sherd thickness and curvature data to show that large vessels became more common. Three explanations are examined to better understand the use of large vessels during this time: bet hedging, costly signaling, and changing technology. The results confirm the use of burial urns in domestic contexts before their final use as interment containers, making technological change the most viable of the three hypotheses.

Keywords:

• burial urns
• Mississippian/protohistoric
• function

Acknowledgments

Several individuals were instrumental in the completion of this research. We wish to thank Evan Peacock, Mississippi State University, who provided information and comments on various aspects of this work. Jim Feathers, University of Washington, reviewed an earlier version of the manuscript and encouraged more careful consideration of the luminescence dates. We are grateful to Nicole Rafferty for creating the box plot. Thanks also go to Karen Y. Smith and four anonymous reviewers, who improved the organization and logical flow of the paper. Funding for AMS and TL dates was available through a grant from the Robert R. Bellamy Foundation, Miami, Florida. Laboratory space and other financial support were provided by the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University.

Notes on Collections

Artifacts used in this research are housed at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, Mississippi.

Notes on contributors

Janet Rafferty (Ph.D., University of Washington-Seattle, 1974) is Professor Emerita of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University, where she taught for 37 years. Her research interests are in settlement pattern change, the prehistoric Southeast, and the use of evolutionary theory to explain cultural change.

Correspondence to: Janet Rafferty, Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, P.O. Box AR, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762. Email: [email protected]

S. Homes Hogue earned her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently serves as Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Anthropology at Ball State University. Her research interests include evolutionary theory, bioarchaeology and, zooarchaeology in the Southeast and Midwest.

Robert McCain received a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2003 and a Master of Arts in Applied Anthropology from Mississippi State University in 2009. His research interests include bioarcheology, archeochemistry, zooarcheology, and microbiology. He was active in the Native American Student Association at Mississippi State and his memberships have included Mississippi Archeological Association and SEAC. He currently lives in Starkville, Mississippi.

Joseph Smith's academic history and interests are diverse. He received a BA in English and an MA in Foreign Language from Mississippi State University. Currently he is finishing another MA in Applied Anthropology at Mississippi State University while working for the Chickasaw Nation full-time as a Preservation Specialist. His research interests include settlement pattern change, cultural transmission, stylistic and functional attribute distinctions, reconciliation of archaeological and ethnographic information, elemental and residue analyses, and scanning electron microscopy applications in archaeology.