Abstract
Tree-ring reconstructions of the soil moisture balance over North America reveal several, region-wide, multi-decadal droughts impacted the northern Lower Mississippi Valley between AD 1250 and 1450. These chronic droughts contributed to regional abandonments and population migrations southward out of the Mississippi-Ohio rivers confluence region and adjacent areas with movements into extreme southeastern Missouri, northeastern Arkansas, southeastern Kentucky, and western Tennessee. In addition, these climatic events appear to have been a major factor in the collapse of the political economy, which prompted these downriver migrations of Mississippian polities. While transformations in political, religious, and social practices would have taken place, it is equally apparent that variable, long-term continuities existed in ritual practice based on a study of a large corpus of whole ceramic vessels from the region. We suggest these ritual continuities helped Mississippians manage the risks associated with climate change but acknowledge the complex human-environment interactions also involved.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the undergraduate and graduate students in our Global Environmental Change class, who, during the spring 2017 and 2019 semesters, helped us test many of these ideas. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (AGS-1266015).
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Burnette, D.J., Dye, D.H., Hill, A.A. (2022). Climate Change, Population Migration, and Ritual Practice in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In: Cook, R.A., Comstock, A.R. (eds) Following the Mississippian Spread. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89082-7_11
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