POLITICAL EVOLUTION IN THE LOWER ILLINOIS VALLEY: A.D. 400-1000 (PREHISTORY, MORTUARY PRACTICES)
The view that the years between A.D. 400 and A.D. 1000 were a dark age in the American Midwest has found support from the fact that mortuary sites from this time are unspectacular. On the other hand, studies of subsistence, settlement, and technological change have found evidence for economic development during the Late Woodland (A.D. 400-800) and Emergent Mississippian (A.D. 800-1000) periods. New methods are developed for analyzing the remains of prehistoric mortuary sites in terms of two primary questions: (1) is there evidence for a decline in the transmissibility of political authority during the years in question?; and (2) is there evidence for decreased effectiveness of local political authority during the same period? The methods developed are applied to burials from the lower Illinois River valley through the use of loglinear modeling of burial treatments and a nonparametric matrix comparison technique, which is applied to data on architectural similarities among cemeteries. The results of the analysis support the contention that Late Woodland and Emergent Mississippian societies were developing, not stagnating
Downloadable Article, Undefined, 1986