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The Beginning of the End: Abandonment Micro-histories in the Mississippian Vacant Quarter

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Abstract

In a poorly understood yet recurring phenomenon, communities occupying diverse settings within a region may undertake large-scale migrations that cannot be easily attributed to single variables such as climate change. As a result, the study of these movements has increasingly focused on the distinct histories of localities to address how they may have articulated as large-scale abandonments. We adopt this micro-history perspective on the fourteenth to fifteenth century depopulation of a large portion of the North American Midwest and Southeast, popularly referred to as the Vacant Quarter. Our research on the Middle Cumberland drainage within the Vacant Quarter suggests that a significant exodus began slowly ca. 1300 CE; then, it accelerated extremely rapidly in the first half of the fifteenth century CE. This genesis of this trajectory seems to be related to a pattern of severe droughts, but it was brought to a close by social and demographic challenges such as endemic conflict and adverse health conditions.

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Data Availability

Data are available in the supplemental files and are freely available to researchers.

Notes

  1. The PDSI relies on temperature and precipitation values derived from tree-ring reconstructions to estimate variation in soil moisture (https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/palmer-drought-severity-index-pdsi). Various aspects of this scale have come under critique (e.g., Alley, 1984; Blain and Xavier, 2019). Nevertheless, it is effectively the best general guide available to archaeologists for paleoclimate assessments o3ver the last millennium in the American Southeast.

  2. The structures and coding of the Bayesian chronological models created in OxCal, as well as the archaeological contexts of each radiocarbon sample, are fully presented in the supplemental materials (S1 Oxcal Script; S2 RC dates).

  3. OxCal’s algorithms for the trapezium prior are detailed in Karlsberg (2006), Lee and Ramsey (2012), and Bronk Ramsey and Lee (2013), with examples of this modeling technique implemented in Lee and Ramsey (2012), Denaire et al., (2017), Fitzpatrick et al., (2017), and Willis et al., (2016).

  4. Charcoal outlier modeling in OxCal was used in all the chronological models to account for unknown inherent age offset in wood charcoal samples (Bronk Ramsey, 2009b). This approach assumes an exponential distribution, with an exponential constant τ of 1 taken over the range − 10 to 0, of the charcoal dates (following Bronk Ramsey, 2009b, and OxCal 4.4’s default settings for Charcoal Outlier modeling). The shifts are then scaled by a common factor that can lie anywhere between 1 and 1000 years. Non-charcoal radiocarbon measurements were given a prior probability of 5% of being statistical outliers, using the General Outlier Model.

  5. The annual PMDI values used to classify harvest years are found in the supplemental materials (S3 PDMI values). They were modeled using a polygon of the Middle Cumberland Region (Eckhardt & Deter-Wolf, 2020) and the SKOPE application (Bocinsky et al., 2022) to query the Living Blended Drought Atlas version 2 (Gille et al., 2017).

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Acknowledgements

We owe a major debt of gratitude to numerous institutions, organizations, and people that have made this work possible. Our collaborative effort was initiated by the Chickasaw Nation, and they continue to support our work through the Chickasaw Explorers Program. The National Science Foundation (BCS-1916596) provided funding for both field and analytical components of our project. Our respective institutions have also lent backing in various ways: the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of South Dakota, the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, Middle Tennessee State University, and Mississippi State University. In addition, the McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the City of Brentwood, TN, graciously made collections available for our research. Finally, our thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for the journal, who provided extremely useful observations and constructive criticisms.

Funding

This work was supported by the Chickasaw Nation and the National Science Foundation (BCS-1916596).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Charles R. Cobb

  2. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, USA

    Anthony M. Krus

  3. Tennessee Division of Archaeology, Nashville, TN, USA

    Aaron Deter-Wolf

  4. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA

    Kevin E. Smith

  5. Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA

    Edmond A. Boudreaux III

  6. Department of Culture and Humanities, The Chickasaw Nation, Ada, OK, USA

    Brad R. Lieb

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  1. Charles R. Cobb
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  2. Anthony M. Krus
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  5. Edmond A. Boudreaux III
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Contributions

Charles Cobb, Anthony Krus, and Kevin Smith wrote the main manuscript text. Charles Cobb, Anthony Krus, and Aaron-Deter Wolf prepared the figures and tables. Anthony Krus and Aaron-Deter Wolf developed the primary Bayesian and PMDI studies, respectively. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Charles R. Cobb.

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Cobb, C.R., Krus, A.M., Deter-Wolf, A. et al. The Beginning of the End: Abandonment Micro-histories in the Mississippian Vacant Quarter. J Archaeol Method Theory 31, 619–643 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-023-09613-w

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