Powers Phase Settlement in the Western Lowlands

Summary

The history of post-A.D. 1250 settlement and use of the sand ridges on the large Pleistocene terrace between the Little Black River and Cane Creek is at once straightforward and exceedingly complicated. Sites are restricted exclusively to the sand ridges as opposed to the interridge areas—a logical placement in what prehistorically was at least seasonally a swampy environment. The terrestrial—aquatic interface offered a mix of subsistence-related resources, the most important of which were white-tailed deer and corn. If we were interested only in a general picture of Mississippian-period settlement in the region, we could stop here, but our interests lie much deeper. Specifically, we are interested in understanding why particular kinds of settlements were located where they were and even more importantly, the sequence of settlement. In other words, were all the settlements contemporaneous, or were all or some of them occupied seuquentially? Intuitively, there must have been temporal overlap among several settlements, certainly including Powers Fort, but complicating matters greatly is the apparent short span of time that the settlements were occupied. As discussed in Chapter 5, radiocarbon dates from Powers Fort, Turner, Snodgrass, Gypsy Joint, and Neil Flurry allow us to accurately gauge the aggregate length of the use of the sand ridges by Powers phase peoples but not the sequence of use