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Licks, Pans, and Chiefs: A Comment on “Mississippian Specialization and Salt”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Richard W. Yerkes
Richard W. Yerkes*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1364
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Abstract

In a recent article in American Antiquity, Muller (1984) challenged the claim that Mississippian salt production was a specialized activity. He made a useful distinction between special activity sites and specialized production in his study, but by limiting his investigation of Mississippian specialization to a single task at a special purpose site (the Great Salt Spring in Galatin County, Illinois), he fails to prove or disprove his hypothesis that no non-leadership specialists existed in Mississippian society. Muller's article also raises some issues about the relation of economic specialization to levels of social complexity in prehistoric cultures, and about measuring the degree of economic specialization in a society from archaeological remains. These issues are addressed in this comment.

Type
Comments
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 402 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1986

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References

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