A Mississippian Mace at Iroquoia's Southern Door

Abstract

This paper documents a Mississippian chipped stone mace, found by Lyle Edger, an amateur collector, in an agricultural field in Nichols, NY, along the Susquehanna River. This crown-form mace is made out of Dover chert and was probably produced by Mississippian people who lived in Middle Tennessee, circa A.D. 1200–1400. We argue that the Nichols Mace could have been acquired by Iroquoian people as the result of either a gift or diplomatic negotiations. We conclude that the meanings the mace held for Iroquoian people were likely tied to how they acquired it.

Keywords:

• Mississippian
• Iroquoian
• interaction
• exchange
• Southeastern Ceremonial Complex

Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to Lyle Edger for sharing with us his unprecedented discovery of the Nichol mace and its archaeological context. We also appreciate how Penelope Drooker, Ryan Parish, Lawrence Conrad, Greg Wilson, Shannon Koerner, Robert Cook, Robert Genheimer, James Brown, James Duncan, David Dye, and Kevin Smith have shared their knowledge and (sometimes unpublished) work with us. We also thank Nina Versaggi and the Public Archaeology Facility at Binghamton University for supporting our research. We want to thank Penelope Drooker, Ryan Parish, Shannon Koerner, Jessica Falcone, and Marta Alfonso Durruty for reading and commenting on various drafts of this paper, as well as Shannon Koerner for producing the maps. The comments of William Engelbrecht and two other anonymous reviewers made this paper better.

Notes on contributors

Bretton T. Giles is a supervisory archaeologist and curation specialist for the Center for the Environmental Management of Military Lands, Colorado State University, who works at Fort Riley, Kansas. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Binghamton University. His research focuses on the prehistoric peoples of the Eastern Woodlands and Plains.

Correspondence to: Bretton T. Giles, Fort Riley Cultural Resource Management, 407 Pershing Court, Fort Riley, Kansas 66442, USA. Email: [email protected].

Timothy D. Knapp is the Assistant to the Director for Prehistoric Archaeology at the Public Archaeology Facility (Binghamton University). He earned his MA in Anthropology at Western Michigan University. His research interests center on the Late Prehistoric communities of Northeastern North America.

Correspondence to: Timothy D. Knapp, Public Archaeology Facility, Binghamton University, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York 13902, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1 Lyle Edger is a periodic amateur collector who is not affiliated with any amateur or quasi-professional archaeological organizations. Edger owns the Nichols mace and has never talked about selling it or financially profiting from his find. Yet Edger is excited about its importance and mentioned at one point that he would like to see it on display at the Smithsonian.

2 For example, Stephen Chrisomalis and Trigger (2004) have pointed out the problems in Iroquoia with equating “race-language-culture.”

3 Some of the literature refers to these objects or motifs as scepters or batons.

4 It is equally difficult to date the (presumably) earlier chipped-stone maces because there are no dates for the contexts in which they were directly found, which is case for the Lilbourn mace (Chapman et al. 1977). Other maces seem to have been curated for an extended period, such as at Spiro (Brown 1996).

5 This raises the question of when the wooden mace from Key Marco dates to. There are both Glade II period (ca. a.d. 900–1200) and Glade III period (ca. a.d. 1200–1513) ceramics from Key Marco, so the site appears to have been used throughout the Mississippian sequence (Widmer 1988:91–93). Given the ambiguous context of Frank Cushing's finds in the Court of the Pile Dwellers, it is impossible to know which component the Key Marco mace is associated with (Widmer 1988:93).

6 It should be noted that the Old Town Ridge mace is a quite large type 1 example that may date to the 1300s (Morrow et al. 2013:3–4).