This book examines the possibility and role of a Cahokian diaspora to understand cultural influence, complexity, historicity, and movements in the Mississippian Southeast. Collectively the chapters trace how the movements of Cahokian and American Bottom materials, substances, persons, and non-human bodies converged in the creation of Cahokian identities both within and outside of the Cahokia homeland through archaeological case studies that demonstrate the ways in which population movements foment social change. Drawing initial inspiration from theories of diaspora, the book explores the dynamic movements of human populations by critically engaging with the ways people materially construct or deconstruct their social identities in relation to others within the context of physical movement. This book is of interest to students and researchers of archaeology, anthropology, sociology of migration and diaspora studies. Previously published in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Volume 27, issue 1, March 2020

In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from Indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.

Explores the archaeology of Mississippian communities and households using new data and advances in method and theory First published in 1995, Mississippian Communities and Households, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, was a foundational text that advanced southeastern archaeology in significant ways and brought household-level archaeology to the forefront of the field. The impressive breadth of case studies presented allowed archaeologists to grapple with the complexities of Mississippian social organization across the region. Reconsidering Mississippian Communitiesand Households revisits and builds on what has been learned in the years since the Rogers and Smith volume. Edited by Elizabeth Watts Malouchos and Alleen Betzenhauser, this new volume advances the field further with the diverse perspectives of current social theory and methods and big data as applied to communities in Native America from the AD 900s to 1700s and from northeast Florida to southwest Arkansas. The book is divided into four parts with overarching themes: articulating communities and households; coalescing and conflicting communities; community and cosmos; and movement, memory, and histories. Watts Malouchos and Betzenhauser bring together scholars researching diverse Mississippian Southeast and Midwest sites to investigate aspects of community and household construction, maintenance, and dissolution. By tacking back and forth between daily domestic practices and wider communal landscapes, contributors engage with communities and households as locations of daily social, political, economic, and religious negotiations. Thirteen original case studies prove that community can be enacted and expressed in various ways, including in feasting, pottery styles, war and conflict, and mortuary treatments.