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Rapid climate change-induced collapse of hunter-gatherer societies in the lower Mississippi River valley between ca. 3300 and 2780 cal yr BP

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Abstract

Hunter-gatherer communities in the American Southeast reached an apogee of social and political complexity in the period between ca. 4200 and 3000 cal yr BP. In the lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) the Poverty Point culture defined this period of socio-political elaboration. However, following a significant period of climate change that led to exceptional flooding and a major reorganization of the course of the Mississippi River, this culture collapsed beginning ca. 3300–3200 cal yr BP and the LMV was abandoned for the subsequent 500 years. In this study, we use data from the Jaketown site in the Yazoo Basin of west-central Mississippi to refine the chronology of the climate event that caused the collapse of the Poverty Point culture. A large flood buried Poverty Point-era occupation deposits at Jaketown around 3310 cal yr BP. Lateral migration of the Mississippi River during flooding led to inundation of the Yazoo Basin and re-occupation of ancient river courses. A coarse sand stratum topped by a more than a meter-thick fining upward sediment package marks a crevasse deposit caused by a rupture of the natural levee at Jaketown. This levee breach was part of a larger pattern of erratic flooding throughout the LMV and is associated with major landscape evolution and the abandonment of Poverty Point sites within the valley. Early Woodland peoples re-colonized the crevasse surface after ca. 2780 cal yr BP. Following this event, the Jaketown site and the eastern Yazoo Basin witnessed a period of landscape stability that lasts to this day. These archaeological data demonstrate how climate change and natural disasters can lead to socio-political dissolution and reorganization even in relatively small-scale hunter-gatherer populations.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and to The Archaeological Conservancy and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for allowing access to the Jaketown site. Our thanks also go to Kelly Ervin for providing Figure 2. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grant No. #0827097) with additional support from the Edward S. and Tedi Macias fund at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63130, USA

    Tristram R. Kidder & Edward R. Henry

  2. Geoarchaeology Laboratory, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63130, USA

    Tristram R. Kidder & Edward R. Henry

  3. GAI Consultants, Inc., Homestead, PA, 15120, USA

    Lee J. Arco

  4. Teaching and Experimental Center for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Protection, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475001, China

    Tristram R. Kidder

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  1. Tristram R. Kidder
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Correspondence to Tristram R. Kidder.

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Kidder, T.R., Henry, E.R. & Arco, L.J. Rapid climate change-induced collapse of hunter-gatherer societies in the lower Mississippi River valley between ca. 3300 and 2780 cal yr BP. Sci. China Earth Sci. 61, 178–189 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-017-9128-8

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