MIDCONTINENTAL JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY

The Orvis Scott Site: A Poverty Point Component on Joes Bayou, East Carroll Parish, Louisiana
Jon L. Gibson
pp. 1-48
The Orvis Scott site is a Poverty Point component located on Joes Bayou 5 kilometers southeast of the Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana. Test excavations and controlled surface collections yielded 8,472 artifacts and other materials, including Poverty Point objects, pottery, plummets, gorgets, celts, soapstone sherds, hoes, projectile points, other bifaces, flake tools, debitage and chipping residue, fire-cracked rock, and sandstone; all attributable to the Poverty Point component and thought to represent the remains of a field camp. Chipped stone artifacts are generally segregated from ceramic and incidential stone artifacts. The high incidence of curated materials is believed to be a consequence of resource shortages that occurred in the Poverty Point hinterland when its earthworks were under construction.

The Prospect Spring Site and the Problem of the Late Woodland/Mississippian Transition in the Western Ozarks
David W. Benn and Jack H. Ray
pp. 49-78
How did the Late Woodland cultures in the western heart of the Ozark Province relate to societies submerged in the Emergent Mississippian stage of development? What kinds of historical conditions and processes were operating within indigenous Ozark societies to cause them to select or reject aspects of Mississippian influence? This article presents pertinent evidence from the Prospect Spring site (23GR711) in the upper Sac River valley of Greene County, Missouri, and many similar Late Woodland site assemblages in the western Ozarks dating to circa A.D. 600-950. We find no diversification of ceramic forms and surface treatments, no evidence for nucleation of communities, no increase in extra-regional trade, no heavy reliance on plant domesticates, and no public architecture other than small burial mounds. Thus, few or none of the social and political processes associated with Emergent Mississippian social formations can be inferred. Selected aspects of Mississippian technology and symbolic artifacts entered the cultures of the Ozark highlands, and some "Mississippian" technologies, e.g., shell tempering, are in fact region-wide innovations that predate the development of ranked societies elsewhere in the trans-Mississippi South.

The Big River Phase: Emergent Mississippian Cultural Expression on Cahokia's Near Frontier, the Northeast Ozark Rim, Missouri
James M. Collins and Dale R. Henning
pp. 79-104
A review of the 1980 excavations at the Bonaker site, 23JE400, contrasts a late-prehistoric cultural expression in the Ozark Rim, Crescent Hills locality, with currently defined local and regional patterns. The Big River phase, radiocarbon dated to A.D. 1050, exhibits an admixture of American Bottom Emergent Mississippian and indigenous Late Woodland traits. The Big River phase is intermediary, both temporally and culturally, between the locally defined Late Woodland Meramec Spring phase and the Mississippian Ware phase. However, stone box graves arranged in circumscribed cemeteries are a conspicuous component of the Big River phase and foreshadow the introduction of stone box cemeteries into the American Bottom by more than a century.

Serpent Mound: A Fort Ancient Icon?
Robert V. Fletcher, Terry L. Cameron, Bradley T. Lepper, Dee Anne Wymer, and William Pickard
pp. 105-143
The Great Serpent Mound of Adams County, Ohio is generally attributed to the Adena culture (approximately 800 B.C. to A.D. 100). However, no artifacts, diagnostic or otherwise, had ever been recovered from within the Serpent embankment proper, so that assignment had been based on the proximity of the Serpent to an Adena burial mound, other Adena burials, and a multicomponent occupation site. The occupation site contained both Adena and Fort Ancient (Baum focus) elements in the correct stratified sequence. In August, 1991, the authors conducted a limited excavation in one section of the Serpent Mound embankment, the first subsurface investigation of the effigy since 1887. The objective was to obtain radiometrically datable material from a context associated with construction of the earthwork. Two 14C samples, obtained from separate and distinct mound strata, yielded identical AMS radiocarbon dates of 920±70 B.P. (uncorrected). These dates and other supporting evidence suggest that a Late Prehistoric temporal period should be considered as likely for the construction of Serpent Mound.