THE EFFECTS OF BOUNDARY CONDITIONS ON THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF HAVANA HOPEWELL AND MARKSVILLE POTTERY (STRUCTURALISM, MORTUARY, ICONOGRAPHY, RITUAL, MISSISSIPPI)

Spatially distributed traces of human behavior in the archaeological record relate to discontinuous mechanisms of social boundary formation, maintenance, and change. Self-organization systems are bounded; systemic closure is accomplished through the organization of information. Style, which interfaces with both theory and method in modeling social interchanges, does not vary directly with organizational boundaries. The observed variation is given form by underlying social and stylistic organizational structures, which may exhibit more or less organizational variability. The ensuing structural constraints that limit the range of effective variation are the focus of this study.;A study of 210 Havana Hopewell and Marksville mortuary vessels from sites in the Mississippi River Valley defines boundary conditions for sharing ritual information in the eastern woodlands of North America during the Middle Woodland period. Vessel proveniences crosscut inequalities in age, sex, and depositional patterns. Though vessels do accompany individual burials, there is no evidence that interment of local ceramic goods is related directly to status, except insofar as attention to ritual details depends on socioeconomic access to goods and knowledge. The long-distance design similarities appear to be the result of a shared learning/training tradition that is not tied to interaction of structurally equivalent social units. The stylistic differences relate to the way individuals or groups respond to broader socioritualistic systems while meeting local socioeconomic obligations.;An approach which contrasts generative rules for motifs with those for design configuration subsumes the controversy over the roles of conscious and unconscious levels of information exchange in stylistic studies. By extension, the separate comparison of similarities and differences in the expression of motifs and design configurations between two systems yields a general model of the structure of information exchange. These similarities and differences relate to learning, influencing, imitating, substituting, and signalizing behavior.