Community and aggregation in the Upper Mississippi River Valley: the Red Wing Locality.

Abstract

The Red Wing Locality is a cluster of Late Precontact villages located in the Upper Mississippi valley of the Midwestern United States. It has long been interpreted as a monolithic presence within the broad regional context of Late Precontact times. While these studies place Red Wing into a broader context relative to a presumed dominant, Mississippian culture and other cultural entities, they have been at the expense of addressing cultural relationships within the Red Wing region itself. The research presented in this dissertation is a community-based, inside-out approach to understanding how the Red Wing Locality functioned for the populations it served. The core focus is the nature of the relationship of Red Wing Locality villages to one another and to their hinterlands. For decades, scholars have recognized the Red Wing Locality as a locale of intense social interaction, and the processes of social aggregation at central places provide an explanatory model for this phenomenon. A diverse range of materials are examined that highlight similarities and differences among villages in the Red Wing Locality. These data demonstrate that contemporary villages on opposite sides of the river had different hinterland contacts and access to resources. One conclusion of this research is that interactions and mobility patterns into and out of the Locality were structured by the Mississippi River. Finally, the Red Wing Locality is examined in the light of a three-tiered non-hierarchical community conceptual framework that at once separated individual settlements, combines the settlement cluster, and ties individual settlements to a broader region that included supporting hinterland populations that aggregated at Red Wing villages. A major contribution of this research is that it provides a new, holistic perspective of the archaeology of the Red Wing Locality and the Upper Mississippi River valley.