Abstract
Allocation of goods in the broadest sense includes three related but different aspects in economic theory:
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1.
The division of wealth among the members of society as individuals and families.
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2.
The division of the value of the output of goods among the producers and other factors involved in the production process.
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3.
The movement of goods into the paths of exchange or commerce.
El dar es honor, Y el pedir dolor. “To give is honor, and begging is grief.”
Spanish proverb
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References
Some of the data and discussions on interaction in the Southeast have been presented in a different form in related papers (e.g., Muller 1995b).
Marginal cost was close to zero in the sense that only the minimum necessary labor for worst-case planning was expended. Any additional crops harvested beyond those needed for daily life cost nothing more than the labor cost any rational producer would have already expended.
T. E. Pulley of the Houston Museum of Natural Science identified some of the Spiro materials and noted that there were species present that could only have come from either the Huastec area in Mexico or from the Florida Keys (Phillips and Brown 1978:26–27). Given the continuity of distributional evidence linking Mississippian peoples down to the Keys and the lack of evidence for Mexican goods in the Southeast, I cannot see that the Veracruz connection is likely (see Muller 1984b).
Since this book was completed, I have received a copy of Brain and Phillips’s (monograph 1996) on shell gorgets of the Southeast. Although I have not had time to examine the work in full detail, I cannot agree with many of the stylistic distinctions made. Unfortunately, Brain and Phillips use some of my terms for new clusters of materials, so that the reader should note that I am using the terms here as originally defined by me (Muller 1966a, 1966b, 1979, 1989, and elsewhere). I also believe that Brain and Phillips’s dating of many styles is far too late, having been influenced unduly by a few heirloom situations.
I say this for several reasons. First, the Citico style proper is generally later than the de Soto entrada, although it seems to have its origins about that time. Second, the Citico style is structurally and morphologically closely related to the earlier Lick Creek style, which has a much more restricted distribution well to the north of anything we might imagine to be Creek (Muller 1966a, 1979). In particular, the Citico gorgets are, more often than not, associated with historical materials in what are most likely to be Cherokee contexts (e.g., Thomas 1894:337–339).
It would also be expected that stylistic unity would occur in those artifacts made by or for social groups engaged in “chiefly” activities (cf. Hally et al. 1990:133), not in domestic circumstances, such as household pottery. Thus, shell gorget styles might generally be a good possibility to examine, but the associations of Citico gorgets are not what we would expect them to be if they were “chiefly” artifacts. Even if questions of contemporaneity and dating were not at issue, Citico gorgets are more commonly associated with “village” rather than “mound” burials (as at Etowah). The Hixon and particularly Williams Island styles, however, were in place in the southern portion of the eastern Tennessee Valley ca. 1500, and more to the south in slightly later times. Their stylistic affiliations are to earlier “middle” Dallas and Wilbanks phase styles in this area going back to the mid-13th century. In numerous cases, the Williams Island gorgets have been associated, like their 13th-century stylistic forebears, with mound burials. The main distribution of Williams Island and Hixon gorgets after the mid-16th century is in central Alabama in historical “Creek” contexts. In addition, their distribution outside their probable areas of origin is associated with other Muskhogean-speaking groups such as the Apalachee. The distribution of Citico gorgets is supposed to coincide with the Coosa chiefdom (cf. Galloway 1995), but I feel that the Williams Island and Hixon gorgets fit better both geographically and in terms of their historical associations. The shell gorget distributions cannot, of themselves, settle the issue, but an identification of Coosa with the Williams Island and Hixon styles would be as consistent with the arguments about Coosa’s location made by Little and Curren (1990) as with the northern locations proposed by Hudson and associates. Moreover, Citico gorgets have a distribution that extends well north and west of the Coosa boundaries drawn by Hudson and his associates. If Citico gorgets were the marker for Coosa, then Coosa would have extended well into western Virginia and western North Carolina (Muller 1966a, 1966b). The Virginia distribution is, I should note, north of the northern limit of Coosa as outlined by Hudson et al. (1985:733). The common form of Citico gorget is also rare in the southern part of their Coosa “province.” The relationship between the transitional Citico-Lick Creek gorgets and distance from Murray County also is not significant (p = 0.93). So far as the Citico theme is concerned, it is difficult to see any of these as controlled from the putative Coosa in Murray County. The identification of this gorget form as a marker for the Coosa chiefdom is not supported by its distribution, its falloff curves from the supposed center of the chiefdom at the Little Egypt locality, nor by its historical derivation from the Lick Creek style.
This is another issue upon which I very strongly disagree with the late dates given to the bulk of Southeastern gorgets in Brain and Phillips (1996). Some of these dates, I believe, would place many northern gorget styles as being later than seems possible for sites such as Cahokia and Kincaid, to mention only one problem area.
A comment by Marx that a “Hegelian” at this stage would see consumption and production as identical because of their connection is, I think, another indication that Marx does not fit into the “realist” camp as suggested by McGuire (1992:114) and others.
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Muller, J. (1997). Distribution, Exchange, and Consumption. In: Mississippian Political Economy. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1846-8_8
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