Mintcy Maxham, Native American Communities in the Twelfth Century, Black Warrior Valley, Alabama

From AD 1050-1650, Moundville chiefs controlled a 40-km stretch of the Black Warrior Valley below Tuscaloosa, Alabama (Knight and Steponaitis 1998; Peebles and Kus 1977). Chiefs and the highest-ranking elites lived at the multiple-mound capital of the polity—the Moundville site—while lesser elites lived at the 10 single-mound political centers located both north and south of Moundville. Some commoners lived in villages adjacent to these mounds, but most of the chiefdom’s population lived in small homesteads without mounds. There have been relatively few detailed studies of individual commoner homesteads or the distribution of homesteads across the Moundville countryside. My dissertation addresses this imbalance by focusing on the rural countryside where Moundville’s commoners lived and worked. I combine site-specific and regional approaches to explore how commoners ordered the spaces in which they lived. The CSAS Graduate Summer Research Grant supported work on the second component of my dissertation, the investigation of regional settlement in the valley.

Since the early 1980s, the Alabama State Oil and Gas Board has defined 22 coal degasification fields within the state. These fields, ranging in size from 2.6-686.3 km2 (1-265 mi2), are bounded areas in which wells are drilled to release methane gas from coal seams. Wells in the first established fields were drilled in advance of mining, but wells in later fields were drilled for the express purpose of commercial coalbed methane production. Many of the state’s 5,600 gas wellpads (each approximately ½ acre [148 x 148 ft; 50 x 50 m] in area) and accompanying access roads were surveyed by archaeological consulting companies prior to their construction. Survey reports indicate that for each wellpad, an area approximately 300 x 300 ft. (91.4 x 91.4 m.; 2.0661 acres), twice the wellpad’s area, was surveyed. These surveys have thus generated a large body of data about the distribution of archaeological sites within the bounded degasification fields. To date, this archaeological survey data has been untapped.

One of 22 fields, the Moundville Degasification Field, straddles Hale and Tuscaloosa Counties, encompassing the heart of the Moundville chiefdom (Figure 1). The Moundville Field is 265 km2 in area and includes both valley and upland zones. Within this field, 301 wells were drilled. But I discovered this summer that not all of these wellpads were surveyed. I also learned that it was not uncommon for an area to be surveyed for a planned wellpad, but for various reasons, the well was not drilled or was moved to a nearby location. Sometimes two or three areas were surveyed for one wellpad. I examined 51 reports at the Office of Archaeological Research and found that 357 300 x 300 ft. areas were surveyed in the Moundville Field. The area surveyed in the Moundville Degasification Field totals 737.56 acres (2.98 km2).

I made two trips to Moundville, Alabama during the summer of 2002 and collected all of the data I need for my regional analysis. Using maps in unpublished survey reports housed at the University of Alabama’s Office of Archaeological Research, I digitized the locations of all surveyed areas within the Moundville gas field’s boundaries. I then went through Alabama’s State Site File and digitized the locations of all known archaeological sites recorded within the bounds of the well field. Using ArcView, I discovered that of the 196 nonmound and six mound sites in the Moundville Degasification Field, only 16 sites intersect the surveyed areas around wellpads. Two of these are European historic sites. Of the remaining 14 aboriginal sites, four had no diagnostic artifacts and cannot be dated. Only ten sites have dateable pre-Columbian components. These results are not particularly surprising, as approximately 58% of the surveyed wellpad areas are in the uplands, defined here as above 50 m AMSL. It has long been assumed that people preferred to live in the floodplain with easy access to the Black Warrior River and fertile soils. My findings confirm this intuitive hypothesis. My research shows that 123 of the 202 sites in the Moundville Degasification Field are located within 400 m of a major waterway—the Black Warrior River, Big Sandy Creek, or Elliots Creek:

Now that data collection is complete, I can begin analysis in earnest. I have themes in my ArcView project file representing Alabama’s topography, soils, geology, and rivers and streams, and I will look for relationships between site locations and features of the biophysical environment. I will identify what factors were important to people when they decided where to build their settlements and attempt to link those factors to broader sociopolitical changes in the valley. I will also estimate population densities through time. I will present these results at my talk in November and report the implications of these findings for our understanding of commoner social organization in the Mississippian Black Warrior Valley.

Center for the Study of the American South
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