Chapter 1 Principles and Principals Chapter 2 A Crisis in Mississippian Archaeology Chapter 3 Breaking the Law of Cultural Dominance Chapter 4 Parsing Mississippian Chiefdoms Chapter 5 The X-Factor Chapter 6 Yoffee's Rule and Cahokia Chapter 7 What Constitutes Civilization? Community and Control in the Southwest, Mexico, and Mesopotamia Chapter 8 Truth, Justice, and the Archaeological Way
Timothy Pauketat is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Pauketat's bold thinking should move Mississippi Valley prehistory
out from the shadows and onto archaeology's center stage, where it
belongs–alongside the world's other civilizations, Old and New.
Readers accustomed to wigwams,chiefs, and mound-builders are in for
a shock. Native history in North America was far grander, far more
interesting, than old textbooks allow. This book is really
interesting! Pauketat is taking American archaeology in exciting
new directions.
*Stephen H. Lekson, curator of archaeology, University of Colorado
Museum of Natural History*
A top flight synthesis of the development of complex societies in
Eastern North America, from a theoretical perspective refreshingly
different from the mainstream. A cross between Walter Taylor’s A
Study of Archeology and Kent Flannery’s The Early Mesoamerican
Village, Pauketat pulls no punches while humorously and incisively
summarizing current research and thinking on the subject in the
region and beyond, and in telling us how we can do better. Any
archaeologist interested in North American archaeology or in the
exploration of complex societies needs to read this book. Some of
you are going to love it; some, I suspect, are going to hate it.
But this volume provides, I believe, a good picture of how many
scholars are going to be thinking about these subjects in the years
to come.
*David G. Anderson, University of Tennessee; co-author (with
Kenneth E. Sassaman) of Recent Developments in Southeastern
Archaeology: From Colonization to Complexity*
In Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, Timothy Pauketat
confronts his colleagues with the stereotypes that guide our
interpretations of past societies. Do our ethnographic models serve
archaeology well? Do they reflect the full range of societies in
the past, or are archaeologists imitatively forcing great variety
and creativity into a few shallow ideological niches? Are North
American archaeologists taught to systematically diminish the
accomplishments of Native North American societies? Wrapped around
a deceptively simple question—“What was Cahokia?”—Pauketat’s
sometimes colloquial, sometimes sharply incisive discussion
challenges us to review our biases, cast off social-evolutionary
shackles, and go boldly into a historically nuanced and broadly
comparative American past.
*Kit Wesler, Murray State University*
Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions is not your typical
book about Mississippian archaeology; there is more theorizing,
critique, and cross-cultural comparison. Then again Pauketat is not
your typical Mississippian archaeologist. Borrowing a page from
Flannery's Early Mesoamerican Village, Pauketat invents a cast of
colorful characters to critically evaluate the problems and
potential for the archaeology of complexity in the Southeastern
United States.
*Gregory Wilson, Muhlenberg College*
In this intriguing study of the prehistory of the eastern U.S. and
how it compares to that of the Southwest, Oaxaca, and the Near
East, Pauketat eschews the study of institutions and social
evolution for the study of people and their interactions: Instead
of looking to check off the attributes of institutions or
organizations—were there palaces, royal tombs, writing?—we look
instead for a series of relationships that played out historically.
How were central places built, central orders memorialized, and
producer autonomy sacrificed?" His is 'a backdoor approach to
building a historical theory of civilization,' considering
non-elite agency as well as activities of the elites. In all of the
areas Pauketat examines, he sees migrations and the dislocations
and opportunities they provide as critical in catapulting societies
toward urbanism. This volume will repay rereading and careful
study, and this reviewer intends to assign it in her North American
prehistory course in the spring. Highly recommended.
*CHOICE*
This book is a passionate polemic about several 'delusions'
Pauketat believes lead archaeologists into serious theoretical and
methodological errors. This is a very entertaining, creative, and
irritating book. It would enliven a seminar class on complexity,
archaeological theory, or North American archaeology.
*Canadian Journal of Archaeology*
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