Mississippi’s northern Yazoo Basin is densely populated with Mississippian-period mound sites. Located along abandoned channels of the Mississippi River, these sites fit a general pattern of one or more platform mounds, plazas, and residential areas. While the elite lived on the mounds and exerted control, in Authority, Autonomy, and the Archaeology of a Mississippian Community, Erin S. Nelson asserts that “…community-building was decidedly not the exclusive purview of elite members of Mississippian communities.”
Parchman Place, a site with five mounds in northwestern Mississippi, was occupied for approximately 200 years during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It has been the subject of extensive research by Nelson and her colleagues. Magnetic gradiometery surveys identified over forty burned structures at Parchman Place. Landscape archaeology, along with the near-surface geophysical exploration, soil cores, and excavations produced a spatial layout of five house clusters, or neighborhoods.
Four of the neighborhoods are around the plaza and have houses arranged around courtyards that would have been shared space for daily tasks. Nelson cites ethnographic accounts and recent studies in iconography and suggests residential house clusters at Parchman Place were clan-based lineages. Like later historic groups, they would have been matrilineal and matrilocal, and thus made up of house groups of related women, their children, and husbands all living in close quarters and using the shared space of the courtyards.
Community spaces at Parchman Place were essential to maintaining order and balance. The built environment was evidence of social order, and empty or negative spaces were equally essential for establishing and maintaining social order. The remaining neighborhood is not directly adjacent to the plaza. Instead, it is between two mounds and the houses are arranged side by side and connected by a path that connected inhabitants to the mounds, as opposed to a shared space. The people living at Parchman Place were probably of different lineages and different clans as well, yet we know they also shared ritual practices like feasting and mound construction.
Research at Parchman Place, which was preserved by The Archaeological Conservancy in 2001, has refined the regional chronology as well as provided an example for future researchers studying site-specific diversity among Mississippian communities. This volume is an important addition to the understanding of Mississippian communities. —Jessica Crawford
