Dr. Ramie A Gougeon

Analyses of three Late Mississippian house floors from the Little Egypt site (9Mu102) were undertaken to discern discrete activity areas used by women and men. Areas were identified by seeking patterns of spatially co-occurring artifact types associated with specific activities, activities frequently correlated strongly with a specific gender in cross-cultural ethnological studies. Women’s activities dominated the assemblages and occupied the most space in all three houses. This model of household activity areas mirrors findings across the southern Appalachian region but does little to understand the social aspects of production within multigenerational, matrilineal, and arguably matrifocal households. This chapter is a further consideration of the gendered uses of space through the lens of taskscapes, those arrays of related activities performed by social actors, to interrogate the experiences of being a Mississippian woman in a domestic house.

In the last four decades, southeastern archaeology has increasingly developed a processual method of looking at archaeological data through varying levels of scale. By adjusting the scale, archaeologists can further define societal interactions and exchanges, which is particularly useful to those researching the Mississippian period, as the rise and fall of chiefdoms was both internally complex and externally influenced by broader regional factors. This use of the most current research methods has enabled a more comprehensive understanding of prehistoric and historic sociopolitical entities.
In Archaeological Perspectives of the Southern Appalachians, Ramie A. Gougeon and Maureen S. Meyers have brought together a dozen archaeologists to delineate multiscalar approaches to Native American sites throughout southern Appalachia. The essays range in topic from ceramic assemblages in northern Georgia to public architecture in North Carolina to the frontiers of southern Appalachia in Virginia. Throughout the volume, the contributors discuss varying scales of analysis in their own research to flesh out the importance of maintaining different perspectives when evaluating archaeological evidence.
Additionally, the volume makes particular reference to the work of David Hally, whose influence on not only the editors and contributors but on southeastern archaeology as a whole cannot be overstated. While Hally was neither a pioneer nor vocal champion of scale variation, his impeccable research, culminating with the publication of his magnum opus King: The Social Archaeology of a Late Mississippian Town in Northwestern Georgia paved the way for younger scholars to truly develop research methods for holistic social archaeology.
Ramie A. Gougeon is an assistant professor with the Division of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of West Florida. He has contributed chapters to Architectural Variability in the Southeast and Ancient Households of the Americas .
Maureen S. Meyers is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi. Her articles have appeared in Southeastern Archaeology, Native South, and the anthology Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone.