The archaeology of Town Creek: Chronology, community patterns, and leadership at a Mississippian town (North Carolina)

Town Creek is an archaeological site located on the Little River in Montgomery County, North Carolina. Long-term fieldwork at Town Creek indicates that the site was occupied at least intermittently by Native Americans for thousands of years. This dissertation reconstructs the site's late prehistoric through early historic period occupation (A.D. 800 to 1650), particularly the several hundred years (A.D. 1150 to 1450) during the Mississippian period when the community consisted of a planned town with domestic and public spaces. Pottery and radiocarbon dates from Town Creek and several related sites are used to refine the area's cultural chronology and define ceramic attributes diagnostic of different periods. The distribution of postholes, burials, and pits is analyzed and discrete architectural units are defined from the thousands of features at Town Creek. Architecture is dated to different periods and an occupational history consisting of five stages is defined. Attributes of buildings are used to identify public and domestic structures within each stage. Public architecture at Town Creek included an earthen platform mound which was constructed around A.D. 1250, approximately 100 years after the town's founding.; Once an occupational history is established, mortuary and ceramic data are used to explore synchronic variation and diachronic change. Emphasis is placed on changes in the nature of leadership roles that may have accompanied mound construction. In particular, a model that proposes a relationship between changes in public architecture and the centralization of political authority in Mississippian societies is tested against the archaeological record of Town Creek. The data indicate that changes in leadership and site structure were associated with mound construction at Town Creek, but that these changes do not necessarily reflect the centralization of political authority.