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University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
The Archaeology of Traditions
The Ripley P. Bullen Series
Florida Museum of Natural History
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The Archaeology of Traditions
Agency and History Before and After Columbus
Edited by Timothy R. Pauketat
Foreword by Jerald T. Milanich, Series Editor
University Press of Florida
Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton
Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers
Copyright 2001 by Timothy R. Pauketat
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
All rights reserved
06 05 04 03 02 01 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The archaeology of traditions: agency and history before and after Colum-
bus / edited by Timothy R. Pauketat; foreword by Jerald T. Milanich.
p. cm. — (The Ripley P. Bullen series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8130-2112-X (alk. paper)
1. Indians of North America—Southern States—Antiquities. 2. Social ar-
chaeology—Southern States. 3. Southern States—Antiquities. I. Pauketat,
Timothy R. II. Series
E78.S65 A79 2001

5. Negotiated Tradition? Native American Pottery in the Mission
Period in La Florida, by Rebecca Saunders 77
6. Creek and Pre-Creek Revisited, by Cameron B. Wesson 94
7. Gender, Tradition, and the Negotiation of Power Relationships
in Southern Appalachian Chiefdoms, by Lynne P. Sullivan and
Christopher B. Rodning 107
8. Historical Science or Silence? Toward a Historical Anthropology
of Mississippian Political Culture, by Mark A. Rees 121
9. Cahokian Change and the Authority of Tradition, by Susan
M. Alt 141
10. The Historical-Processual Development of Late Woodland
Societies, by Michael S. Nassaney 157
11. A Tradition of Discontinuity: American Bottom Early and Middle
Woodland Culture History Reexamined, by Andrew C. Fortier 174
12. Interpreting Discontinuity and Historical Process in Midcontinental
Late Archaic and Early Woodland Societies, by Thomas E.
Emerson and Dale L. McElrath 195
13. Hunter-Gatherers and Traditions of Resistance, by Kenneth E.
Sassaman 218
14. Traditions as Cultural Production: Implications for Contemporary
Archaeological Research, by Kent G. Lightfoot 237
15. Concluding Thoughts on Tradition, History, and Archaeology,
by Timothy R. Pauketat 253
Bibliography 257
List of Contributors 337
Index 343
Figures
1.1. Locator map 2
1.2. Pre-Columbian pottery bottle from Arkansas 7
1.3. Wall-trench building floor, ca. a.d. 1100, southwestern Illinois 9

2.1. Marriages by occupation at the Hermitage, 1829–1855 30
4.1. Dress artifacts from Los Adaes houses 69
4.2. Ceramics from Los Adaes houses 71
4.3. Trade goods from Los Adaes houses 71
4.4. Faunal remains from Los Adaes structures 73
11.1. Hallmarks of American Bottom Middle Woodland assemblages 188
Foreword
Archaeologists long have divided themselves into two camps, historical
archaeologists and nonhistorical archaeologists, those who studied pre-
Columbian cultures. As Timothy R. Pauketat of the University of Illinois
notes, historical archaeologists, blessed with written records as a source of
data, had the luxury of examining documents to help them document
historical processes and determine “what regularities owe their origins to
common historical linkages.” On the other hand, archaeologists studying
the pre-Columbian past searched for those common processes that ex-
plain “all people in all places.”
In recent years the theoretical schism between historical and “pre-
historical” archaeologists has begun to blur as a new paradigm dubbed
“historical processualism” has emerged, one which recognizes that we can
better understand the past in terms of history, defined here as “cultural
construction through practice.” What people and groups did in the past is
best understood within the context of their histories and cultures, within
their traditions. History defined in this fashion is not the purview solely of
historians or of historical archaeologists, and the archaeology of historical
process becomes an important guide to explaining the past.
In his introductory chapter, Pauketat offers a cogent discussion of this
theoretical approach, which is then amplified and demonstrated in twelve
case studies, each penned by an archaeological scholar working in the
southeastern United States.
Kent Lightfoot supplies a commentary that assesses how well the

is a mistake. Permit me a brief digression to explain what I mean. Someone
at a Southeastern Archaeological Conference recently asked me why
people built pyramids of earth, stone, or mud brick around the world
throughout history. My response went something like this: perhaps there
is some innate human tendency to build toward the sky, but that’s a ques-
tion of human nature, not human culture. It is a question for a psycholo-
gist, a biologist, perhaps a theologian, but not an archaeologist. What do
we learn from this answer that we didn’t already accept or reject in the
beginning? Not much.
It is more satisfying to compare how cultural phenomena happened at
various points in time and across space. That is what this book is all about.
The Southeast is well suited to the investigation of what we label “histori-
cal processes” and exemplifies a direction in which archaeology in general
must move. Perhaps, if we try to figure out how history happened, we may
one day be able to answer the ultimate metaphysical questions of our day
(emphasis on “our day”). However, this will come only after dealing with
the proximate how questions that archaeology has asked too infrequently
and too timidly. Moreover, the relevance of those why questions may have
faded before we get a chance to answer them.
xiv | Preface
This volume is an outgrowth of a symposium titled “Resistant Tradi-
tions and Historical Processes in Southeastern North America” at the 64th
Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Chicago,
March 1999. I would like to thank the original participants of that ses-
sion, all of whom are represented in the present volume except for
Kathleen Deagan, who served as a discussant alongside Kent Lightfoot.
The original idea for the session was the study of resistance before and
after Columbus. However, that theme began to drift almost immediately
toward a broader focus on tradition and tradition making. In this regard,
the Southeast and all things traditional go together remarkably well. Ar-

or making things, allowed a group to survive (see Binford 1965).
The earlier generation’s theories of cultural change and those of the
processual archaeologists, not to mention time-honored methods of se-
quencing cultural remains, rest on taken-for-granted notions of tradition
(cf. Marquardt 1978). Sometimes stated, but often unstated, they adhere
to a deeply engrained view that ideas, cultures, or styles change gradually
and slowly while political and economic spheres change rapidly. For them,
traditions are conservative and cultures are seen to lag behind the times,
retaining vestiges of earlier periods. This adherence, which cannot be as-
signed to a specific school of thought, is increasingly called into question
2 | Timothy R. Pauketat
by more recent studies that place people back into anthropological models
of how change comes about (see Rees, this volume).
Today, tradition and related concepts are reappearing in discussions
that purport to redirect how we explain the past (Dobres 2000; Hendon
1996; Joyce and Hendon 2000; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Pauketat 2001).
From a contemporary perspective, a tradition is some practice brought
from the past into the present. It may be a personal practice, a group
practice, or an entire population’s practice. By opening up the definition
thus, I do not intend to make it so general as to lack explanatory utility.
Technically, certain traditions at the personal or population ends of the
spectrum may not be useful abstractions. However, opening up the defini-
tion allows one to argue that traditions are not passive and benign ways of
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Toqua
WESSON
Moundville
Nodena
Toltec
LOREN
REES
SCARRY
San Luis
SULLIVAN and RODNING
Fig. 1.1. Locator map.
A New Tradition in Archaeology | 3
doing things but are malleable, subject to politicization, and always “ne-
gotiated” between persons and among peoples at multiple scales. Tradi-
tion in this sense is part of the dynamic and contingent “cultural construc-
tion” process, a fluid “reactualization” of the past (see Borofsky 1987;
Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983; Sahlins 1985; Toren 1999; see also Coma-
roff and Comaroff 1991). Given this broadened sense of tradition, archae-
ologists should be able to address a central question of the human experi-
ence. How do people throughout history become separate peoples with
seemingly distinct identities, ways of doing and thinking, and specific
technologies to cope with the outside world?
David Kertzer (1988) offers a series of examples that reveal traditions
(or traditional symbols) to be potent media for negotiations that generate
cultural change. For instance, fundamentalist religious leaders and politi-
cians use traditions to attract followers. Traditions used in such ways are
the basis of social movements, coalitions, or revolutions. These are cases
of tradition in the service of high-order political interests. In the course of
world history, such coopted traditions have built cathedrals and pyramids,
overthrown governments, and revitalized religions.

remains are not “texts” to be read in different ways depending on one’s
contemporary biases (see Hodder 1989).
A dismissal of history as mere detail was common to the processual
archaeology of the 1970s and derives from an often unstated commitment
to the insidious notion of behavior (see Pauketat 2001). As used in archae-
ology, behavior has implied a uniformity of action that allows a popula-
tion to cope with some condition. This is insidious because it means that
actual people and their traditions have little explanatory value.
The history-as-narrative argument is a “postmodern” position, taken
most often by nonarchaeologists, that locates history in the present-day
interpretive narratives of some person or group instead of in the past (e.g.,
Errington 1998). The argument goes: there are many narratives about the
past, and who are we to claim that archaeology can deduce the truth from
among them (see Shanks and Tilley 1987)?
1
Fortunately, we may dispense
with this history-as-narrative position. Narratives do exist, but only as
part of any process of tradition building. They are acts of interpretation
with reference to the past, not the entirety of actions—not the diachronic
series of actions—that gave shape to the present or to any moment in time.
One might think of history as a whole series of interconnected narratives,
the point being that how those narratives were constructed relative to each
other is something concrete and very different from a single narrative.
Archaeologists can measure such concrete, diachronic series using the resi-
dues of what people actually did. Narratives can lie; people’s garbage
seldom does (see Rathje 1974).
My definition of history as the process of tradition building or cultural
construction through practice is considerably broader than history as ei-
ther noise or narrative. History is the practicing and embodying of tradi-
tions on a daily basis. “Practice” in the sense that I use it refers to any

transformations between constraints, as if the latter were static states that
stood apart from the process of tradition building itself (for a parallel
argument, see Plog 1973). With specific regard to the use of tradition as
constraint, archaeologists mistakenly assume the existence of widely
shared, unchanging, and homogeneous cultures. Hence, they do not view
traditions as requiring explanations. However, from the dynamic-tradi-
tion position advocated here, cultural heterogeneity is the rule rather than
the exception. Consequently, continuity demands an explanation.
By taking a dynamic-tradition position, one need not disavow descrip-
tive units of cultural-historical or sociological reconstruction that connote
homogeneity and continuity. We can still isolate and name traditions,
meanings, environments, identities, regional cultures, and the like. Indeed,
recognizing and naming macroscale patterns are first steps toward
processual explanations. These patterns are real and, depending on how
they are recognized, may have considerable interpretative utility. For in-
6 | Timothy R. Pauketat
stance, an archaeological ceramic tradition or a chronological phase may
correlate with some past social upheaval, demographic shift, popular
movement, residential unit, or labor coordination (see Alt, Emerson and
McElrath, Fortier, Sassaman, Saunders, this volume). In my own research,
phases established thirty years ago based on pottery styles seem to corre-
late relatively well with new information on major developments in the
formation and disintegration of a pre-Columbian polity (Pauketat
1998b). This is perhaps not surprising to many archaeologists who retain
an implicit faith in their ability to account for the past. Given the present
views of practice and materiality, it is even less surprising.
Nonetheless, we must remain cognizant of the fact that the recognized
cultural patterns—traditions, meanings, identities, environments, phases,
and so on—are only imperfect abstractions of past cultural processes.
Even seemingly ancient myths, icons, or cosmological themes are not truly

tutions and ideologies, domestication and sedentism, and artifact distribu-
tions, ethnicities, and centralization, among many other things. Such
studies have enabled archaeologists to obtain understandings of the broad
parameters of cultural processes.
Given this, we could conclude that broad correlations of constraints,
econometric indices, or demographic measures, and so on, are not only
necessary steps in explanation; they are the primary goal of much archaeo-
logical study. However, correlation is not causation. Such correlations,
indices, or measures do not themselves explain the processes of cultural
construction, because they rely on macroscale concepts already one or
more steps removed from the historically constituted practices of people.
Fig. 1.2. Pre-Columbian
pottery bottle from Ar-
kansas with quartered
motifs and cross-in-circle
design field.Image Not Available

8 | Timothy R. Pauketat
Practice and Materiality
Practices are not the links between structures or constraints in a causal
chain. Instead, they are the continuous construction wherein constraints
are always “becoming” constraints (Sztompka 1991). That process is a
complex one, since all people enact, embody, and represent, and they do
this in all social contexts. It involves practices of all sorts ongoing every-
where and everyday. Thus, tradition making is not only continuous; it is a
human universal. In theory, how hunter-gatherers made projectile points
at, say, 8000 b.c. can be explained with reference to a process that also

A New Tradition in Archaeology | 9
homebuilders constructing houses are engaged in a kind of dialogue with
the others around them and with their own sense of tradition. The acts of
small groups, even if not designed to achieve some large political goal, can
resonate at regional and panregional scales.
For instance, a meal at one’s home with one’s immediate family may
seem rather inconsequential to most other people in the world. And it may
be. However, the same meal eaten while entertaining visiting dignitaries
carries much more historical import, as it would presumably impart an
impression about oneself and one’s household to the visitors, who might
communicate that impression to others. The scale of an ordinary house-
hold practice, in that case, simultaneously exceeds the household. In a
similar vein, a speech made to one person will have a smaller-scale effect,
regardless of content, than the same speech carried by the mass media. The
practice is the same, the circumstances and the scale of the historical ef-
fects quite different. A good example of this is the spread of wall-trench
architecture within certain regions (e.g., Alt, this volume) and across re-
gions of the Southeast after a.d. 1050 (see fig. 1.3).
Besides being multiscaled, the process of tradition making always occu-
pies space or matter. It is cultural construction figuratively, as the building
Fig. 1.3. Wall-trench building floor, ca. a.d. 1100, southwestern Illinois.Image Not Available

10 | Timothy R. Pauketat
of collective sentiments, values, and meanings, and it may be construction
literally, as the physical act of building, production, and manufacture. In
this way, the process of tradition making or cultural construction through
practice differs little from Giddens’s (1979) sense of “structuration,” ex-

ing them as continuously unfolding phenomena. The idea of the châine
opératoire, or technical-operational chain, has been offered as a useful
heuristic device for understanding this process in a technological sense
(Dobres 1999, 2000; Stark, ed., 1998). That heuristic involves focusing on
how tools were made and used by various people through time as a way to