In an increasingly complex world, it is increasingly necessary to understand complexity: how it develops, how it functions, and how it changes the ways that humans behave. As the world becomes more and more driven by conflicting ideologies, ideology itself becomes more central to the world in which we live. Many fields of social science or humanities research are interested in ideology, but few have the ability to research the long-term processes that are accessible to archaeologists.
This is what has drawn me to the study of late prehistoric Native American cultures in the Eastern Woodlands, especially the Mississippian cultures of circa A.D. 1000-1500. These cultures were the most sociopolitically complex cultures to develop in North America prior to European contact. Small enough to be manageably studied, but still complex enough to exhibit many of the characteristics of our own society, Mississippian cultures were also recent enough that they can provide archaeologists with detailed, specific data.
Mississippian cultures therefore provide archaeologists with an ideal case study in how social and political complexity develops, plays out, and (in the cases of some Mississippians) ultimately collapses. These are issues of direct relevance to modern, post-industrial Western society. Other fields of inquiry can only access portions of those historical processes.
The major question, however, is how to decipher Mississippian archaeology in such a way as to draw relevant conclusions. A sociocultural anthropologist would utilize ethnographic interviews; a historian would work with documentary evidence. For an archaeologist studying a non-literate society, the closest equivalent is iconographic artwork. Properly analyzed—using both qualitative and quantitative techniques drawn from such diverse fields as folkloristics, cognitive linguistics, and semiotics—iconographic artwork can reveal information about prehistoric ideas and beliefs almost as detailed as a written record. It is for this reason that much of my research activity has been dedicated to developing such techniques or adapting them to archaeological data.
For example, in my masters research, I identified oral stories in the highly visual art created by Mississippians at Spiro, Oklahoma, by combining concepts and techniques from folkloristics with the quantitative analyses more familiar to archaeologists. In the process, I showed (with a very high degree of statistical certainty) that Spiro leaders were promoting specific concepts of leadership by sponsoring the telling of certain tales. Such strategies—controlling politics by controlling narrative—are still evident in modern US politics.
My doctoral research shifted attention to the Lower Ohio River Valley, where I created new statistical techniques to investigate social and political organization using only iconographic artwork. This provided a statistically valid way to cross-check conclusions about Mississippian organization based on other sorts of data. These techniques can also be easily adapted to the study of any society at any level of complexity, including modern US society.
All of my research is aimed at understanding the minds of prehistoric Native American peoples. By understanding the minds of Mississippians, we can better understand them as people. Iconography also sheds light on how their own sociopolitical complexity affected their world, giving an insight into how our own world might be changing.
In sum, then, my research interests lie primarily in using the iconography of Mississippian cultures to better understand their sociopolitical complexity, but not (necessarily) as an end in itself. Rather, I seek to use that understanding to gain a better grasp on issues of increasingly concern in our own world.