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Mississippian Specialization and Salt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jon Muller
Jon Muller*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901
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Abstract

Despite a tendency to treat Mississippian production as involving specialization, little effort has been made to test these proposals in actual field work. A distinction between specialization at a site and specialization of producers is made in this article and applied to materials from the Great Salt Spring, a Mississippian salt production site in southern Illinois. Testing and excavations in 1981 and 1982 show that this was a true limited activity site. Nonetheless, the data on producer organization do not strongly support the conclusion of specialist production there and are consistent with simpler models of non-specialist production.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , July 1984 , pp. 489 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1984

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References

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