Paper short abstract:

The archaeology of hunter-gatherers living in the Mississippi floodplain between 5000 and 3000 years ago demonstrates that land use strategies are best understood in the context of the sociopolitical relationships underlying them.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores using the past to inform conservation efforts today using an archaeological case study from the Lower Mississippi Valley of the United States. Drawing from research on hunter gatherers in the region during the Late Archaic (ca. 5000-3000 years BP), I propose looking to social structure rather than resource management strategies when trying to derive resilient solutions. The ecology of the Mississippi floodplain has been radically altered by centuries of plantation and industrialized agriculture. Drawing from historical and political ecology, the ecology of an anthropogenic environment is a palimpsest of social and political history. Strategies of land use, then, are meaningless without an understanding of the social relationships that created and maintained them. Data suggest that Late Archaic society was non-hierarchical, encompassed cycles of gathering and disaggregation, and facilitated nearly continent-wide exchange networks. I discuss these aspects according to their material remains: earthworks as records of collaborative labor projects; stratified deposits rich in persimmon as evidence for cycles of gathering; and chenopod seeds and imported lithics as representatives of material and informational exchange. The social relationships encoded in these practices were essential to Late Archaic land use, a system of gathering, fishing, and hunting that persisted for millennia. If we want to learn from how Indigenous people in the past managed the Mississippi floodplain, I argue we start by looking at the difference between the social relationships that characterized the Late Archaic and the relationships that characterize the system of capitalist production threatening the floodplain today.