No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The venerable concept of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) needs to be discarded, because it has become an impediment to understanding. The phenomena to which this name most commonly refers are not necessarily Southeastern, not focused primarily on the ceremonial, and most emphatically are not a in any meaningful sense. Art style, iconography, ritual practice, and exchange have divergent trajectories in the Mississippian Southeast. Progress will be made by replacing the SECC with more specific units addressing these domains, at variable scales. Goodbye is too good a word, babe. (B. Dylan) The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex is an archaeological concept that, like any other, is in need of constant reevaluation. Does it perform useful work? Does it make things clearer for us? In this opportunity I will pick up the thread of a comment made by Philip Phillips and James Brown some 30 years ago-that the SECC a vehicle for archaeological understanding . . . may have outlived its usefulness (Phillips and Brown 1975:169). I am forced to conclude that it has long since done so. Among my grounds for saying so are that the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex idea, as presently used, (1) is not Southeastern, (2) is not ceremonial, and (3) is not a complex. Despite its survival in the literature to date, it is nonetheless, in my opinion, an empty shell of a structure ready for abandonment. By endorsing this abandonment, naturally I wish to suggest its replacement by more productive concepts. The Southern Cult, now known under a less baggage-laden and more palatable name as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, was born in the Great Depression. It was a synthetic hypothesis that tied together the artistic productions of three major late prehistoric centers, Etowah in Georgia, Moundville in Alabama, and Spiro in Oklahoma. As formulated by Waring and Holder (1945), the Cult would be defined by a unitary artistic core that encompassed a set of motifs, god-animal representations, ceremonial objects, and items of costume. This artistic core was tied to a specific sociological hypothesis: it was the material expression of a short-lived cult that crosscut otherwise independent regional cultures and spread rapidly in very late times due to a nativistic movement. With its appearance, objections to its definition as a unitary complex were immediate and have continued ever since. The same year that Waring and Holder's paper was published, Krieger wrote that he was unable as yet to shake off the impression that the Southeastern material as a whole represents the operation of several interrelated ritualistic complexes. The principal reason for this, he stated, lies in the considerable areal differences in emphasis or preoccupation with certain forms and motifs, to the exclusion or neglect of others (Krieger 1945:486, emphasis added). Krieger argued that the art was stylistically indigenous (i.e., not Mesoamerican), the subject matter mythological, and that common elements had been selectively reinterpreted in each area in which the so-called Cult was found. By implication, conventional meanings of similar images in these varied locales were not necessarily the same. At a symposium dedicated to the matter in 1947, Alex Krieger, Frederica DeLaguna, and Philip Phillips each insisted that the idea of a unified phenomenon was inadequate (Waring 1968 [1948]). In a seminal critique published in 1976, Brown again took issue with Waring and Holder's unitary concept, calling it notably unfruitful and unsuccessful (1976:115). Phillips and Brown (1978:169) reiterated that they were really dealing with an interconnected medley of partly syncretized religious phenomena. In the last 30 years, the SECC concept has survived, but usages have become increasingly apologetic and grudgingly applied (Brown 1989; Knight 1996; Knight et al. 2001; Lankford 2004; Muller 1986, 1989; Steponaitis and Knight 2004). As Brown (1989:183) stated, Breaking out of the confines of the original taxonomic characterization of the ceremonial objects and conventionalized symbols of the Mississippian period is needed before we can learn anything new. …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.