Pans and a Grain of Salt: Mississippian Specialization Revisited

Abstract

Yerkes's comments fail to place my article in its context of other research on the lower Ohio Valley. He reacts more to what he thinks I believe than to what I actually wrote. Yerkes seems to want to identify Mississippian specialization on the basis of artifact traits rather than on the basis of actual organization of production. Moreover, he does not present any additional significant evidence to support the idea that true specialization was present in Mississippian society, in the American Bottom or elsewhere. The need to reject lower-level explanations of data before proposing higher-level explanations is not sufficiently appreciated. Finally, there is not sufficient appreciation of the degree of importance of the concept of specialization to the investigation of the social evolution of hierarchical systems.