THE EARLY MISSISSIPPIAN FRONTIER IN THE LOWER CHATTAHOOCHEE

Explanations of Mississippian origins are sometimes presented as a choice between in situ cultural developments versus population movement. We examine these contrasting perspectives in the context of interaction among three regional populations with disparate material culture traditions and differing degrees of organizational complexity. We argue that population movement was the mechanism that established the initial Mississippian communities in the lower ChattahoocheeApalachicola region, and subsequent cultural developments among neighboring indigenous populations were influenced by the presence of immigrant settlers. We propose that the different ways in which regional populations responded to interaction across a geographical, cultural, and sociopolitical frontier placed them on divergent paths to Mississippianization. logists thought population movement a capricious historical event rather than a cultural process structured by recurrent principles. Lathrap argued against this perspective, however, and maintained that understanding population movement as a process is as fundamental to cultural evolution as understanding the processes of radiation and drift is to biological evolution. Yet the ecodemographic functionalism of processual archaeology, as practiced over the decades since Lathrap's essay, merely reinforced the barrier between culture history and cultural process. In this article, we examine how these issues have shaped archaeological debates about Mississippian origins in the lower Chattahoochee-Apalachicola River