Abstract
The Lower Chattahoochee River Valley has served as a frontier of Mississippian period expansion to the east and as an important intermediary between populations along the Gulf Coast and polities further to the interior. Between AD 1100 and 1200, numerous examples of Mississippian period practices appeared in the region, including wall trench construction and palisaded settlements, and monumental architecture was reintroduced as an important component of the built environment. Starting in AD 1300, the large-scale population aggregation at specific long-lived settlements drove the reconfiguration of those settlements through the rapid construction of monumental architecture and public spaces over the next 100 years. After AD 1400, these locations were largely abandoned, and the formerly centralized populations dispersed throughout the region. In this chapter, these diachronic local and regional settlement patterns are articulated with available climate data to better illuminate how the inhabitants of the lower Chattahoochee River valley organized, changed, and strengthened their society(ies) in the face of environmental unpredictability during the first millennium A.D.
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Brannan, S. (2022). Population Aggregation and Dispersal as a Driver for Settlement Change in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley Between AD 1100 and 1500. In: Cook, R.A., Comstock, A.R. (eds) Following the Mississippian Spread. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89082-7_10
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