Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T08:12:03.014Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Licks, Pans, and Chiefs: A Comment on “Mississippian Specialization and Salt”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Richard W. Yerkes
Richard W. Yerkes*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1364
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In a recent article in American Antiquity, Muller (1984) challenged the claim that Mississippian salt production was a specialized activity. He made a useful distinction between special activity sites and specialized production in his study, but by limiting his investigation of Mississippian specialization to a single task at a special purpose site (the Great Salt Spring in Galatin County, Illinois), he fails to prove or disprove his hypothesis that no non-leadership specialists existed in Mississippian society. Muller's article also raises some issues about the relation of economic specialization to levels of social complexity in prehistoric cultures, and about measuring the degree of economic specialization in a society from archaeological remains. These issues are addressed in this comment.

Type
Comments
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 402 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Brown, Ian 1980 Salt and the Eastern North American Indian, an Archaeological Study. Lower Mississippian Survey Bulletin No. 6, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Chappie, Eliot D., and Coon, Carleton S. 1942 Principles of Anthropology. Henry Holt, New York.Google Scholar
Evans, Robert K. 1978 Early Craft Specialization: An Example from the Balkan Chalcolithic. In Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating, edited by Redman, C. L., Berman, M. J., Curtin, E. V., Langhorne, W. T. Jr., Versaggi, N. M., and Wanser, J. C., pp. 113–129. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Feinman, Gary 1983 Pottery Production and Political Change: An Example from Formative Oaxaca. Paper presented at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago.Google Scholar
Flannery, Kent V. 1972 The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3: 339–426.Google Scholar
Flannery, Kent V., and Winter, Marcus C. 1976 Analyzing Household Activities. In The Early Mesoamerican Village, edited by Flannery, K. V., pp. 34–47. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Gledhill, John 1978 Formative Development in the North American Southwest. In Social Organization and Settlement: Contributions from Anthropology, Archaeology, and Geography, edited by Green, D., Haselgrove, C, and Spriggs, M., pp. 241–290. B. A. R. International Series (Supplementary) 47(H), Oxford.Google Scholar
Hirth, Kenneth G. 1984 The Analysis of Prehistoric Economic Systems: A Look to the Future. In Trade and Exchange in Early Mesoamerica, edited by Hirth, K. G., pp. 281–302. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.Google Scholar
Muller, Jon 1984 Mississippian Specialization and Salt. American Antiquity 49: 489–507.Google Scholar
Renfrew, Colin 1973 Trade and Craft Specialization. In Neolithic Greece, edited by Theocharis, D. R., pp. 179–991. National Bank of Greece, Athens.Google Scholar
Sanders, William T., Parson, Jeffrey R., and Santley, Robert S. 1979 The Basin of Mexico. Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Tosi, Maurizio 1984 The Notion of Craft Specialization and Its Representation in the Archaeological Record of Early States in the Turanian Basin. In Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology, edited by Spriggs, M., pp. 22–52, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Yerkes, Richard W. 1986 Mississippian Craft Specialization on the American Bottom. In Cahokia and Its Neighbors: Mississippian Cultural Variation in the American Midwest, edited by Emerson, T. E. and B, R. Lewis. University of Illinois Press, in preparation.Google Scholar