Mississippian Women - (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen) by Rachel V Briggs & Michaelyn S Harle & Lynne P Sullivan (Hardcover)

About the Book

This volume highlights the vital role women played within the diverse societies of the Mississippian world, which spanned the present-day United States South to the Midwest before the seventeenth century.

Book Synopsis

Highlighting the role of precontact Indigenous
women in building and transforming Mississippian culture

This volume highlights
how women were powerful farmers, economic decision-makers, spiritual leaders,
and agents of social integration in the diverse societies of the Mississippian
world, which spanned the present-day United States South to the Midwest before
the seventeenth century. While Mississippian societies are some of the most
well-researched pre-European contact societies on the continent, little attention
has been dedicated specifically to Mississippian women. These chapters offer
new insights into the vital role women played within their communities, an
approach directly informed by the powerful position of American Indian women
within contemporary American Indian communities.

Contributors
examine themes such as identity, labor, grieving, cooking, craft production,
spatial organization, prestige, morbidity, kinship, and fertility. Case studies
include sites throughout the Mississippian world, ranging from Illinois to
Florida, including Cahokia and Moundville. Mississippian
Women is the first volume to focus solely on the political, social, and economic
power of women during this period, linking their actions in building their culture
before European colonialism with the work of Indigenous women in the region
today.

A
volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

About the Author

Rachel
V. Briggs
is teaching assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michaelyn S. Harle is an archaeologist at the Tennessee Valley Authority. Lynne P. Sullivan, curator emerita of archaeology at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee, is coeditor of Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States.