the mounds atop which they lived and worshipped. Through the reciprocal relations of leaders and followers, of men and women, and of friends and relations, commoners negotiated the bonds that held their towns together. Such negotiations in turn influenced exchanges among towns. As much as Zamumo would have liked to convince de Soto otherwise, chiefs were not the only ones who exchanged things.
Common people, like their leaders, tended to live on their stored agricultural surpluses, especially corn, squash, and, after about 1200 c.e., beans.29 They supplemented this diet with nuts, berries, fish, water-fowl, and deer.30 Mississippians organized many of the tasks of subsistence along lines of gender. The men and women of pre-contact Tukabatchee, a prominent town on the Tallapoosa River, manufactured the tools necessary for their tasks in separate spaces in their homes. The stone flakes left over from men’s manufacture of arrowheads litter one corner while the broken pottery from women’s ceramic making lies in another. If the activities of their colonial-era descendants are any guide, Mississippian men probably cleared the agricultural fields and hunted while women cultivated the crops and gathered other seasonal foods that grew wild. Language reflected these divisions, with Muskogean grammar and vocabulary varying according to the gender of the speaker.31 Much to their chagrin, French traders among the Natchez learned about a similar linguistic divide, for “by chiefly frequenting the women, [they] contracted their manner of speaking, which was ridiculed as effeminacy by the women, as well as the men, among the natives.”32 Men’s and women’s complementary roles in family and social life carried into political life as well. Among elite families, men apparently had greater access to the chieftaincy than women, and those few commoners who earned burial in or near a temple mound were usually distinguished warriors.33 Women’s importance as the principal providers of food endowed them with significant influence in the household, and senior women could help shape the ideas of their clan members who dwelled with and near them.34 Bound together in relationships in which each provided and each received, men’s and women’s power depended less on control than interdependence.
Sharing also joined clans and chiefs. If the geography of the chief was the town, that of the clan was the house. Most Mississippian people inhabiting modern Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee lived in large, square homes whose floors were dug slightly below ground level and whose walls were banked with earth to provide greater insulation in the winter. Adjacent to their homes, families built raised open-air structures that could be used as summer dwellings. In the same way that chiefs buried their prominent ancestors under new layers of the mound or interred them in the nearby charnel house, many people honored their recently deceased kin by burning the homestead before burying the dead kin and rebuilding a new home over them. As further evidence of the power of kin ties, clan members within a town often built their homes near each other. Children probably grew up among their mother’s family, and the most respected members of the clan were likely the occupants of the larger homes located closest to the open plaza that spread out before every temple mound.35
The power of clans also appeared in later stories of Creek origins, too. In some versions, clans rather than towns emerged from the earth, each clan enveloped in a fog that prevented its members from seeing the world around them. Gradually a wind began to blow, and as it did so, the clans began to recognize one another in the dissipating mist. The first to emerge from the fog became known as the Wind clan, and as others began to see the world around them, they saw different animals that became their clan’s totem. As the first clan to be free of the fog, the Wind clan gained a certain prominence above all others.36 Clans provided a fundamental bond for Creeks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The strongest link in Creek political and social standing,” noted the Creek historian George Stiggins in 1836, “is their clanship or families.” According to Thomas Nairne a century earlier, even as clans grew, fragmented, and migrated to other towns, their members continued to acknowledge ties to distant kin, with “divers Tribes or nations of Different Languages . . . having constant quarrels one with the other, yet at the same time pretending kindred.”37 The connections of clans mitigated conflict by providing a network that transcended locality.
Mississippian clans were important, but their members still offered the choicest portions of the hunt and harvest to their chief, and they reaffirmed their association with the mound and its privileged occupants through their participation in the initial process of town planning and layout and the recurring rituals of mound renewal. The reciprocal relations that encouraged followers to provide labor and goods in exchange for local and cosmic security promoted the power of the few over the many. Although clan ties extended beyond the limits of the town and seemed to defy a leader’s local influence, some skillful leaders could also influence neighboring chiefdoms. Mississippian titles reflected these levels of influence. Although Spanish explorers frequently referred to late Mississippian leaders by the Arawak term “caciques,” Muskogean speakers like those in the Coosa paramount chiefdom differentiated their leaders with a variety of titles. An orata, which the chronicler Juan de la Bandera translated as señor menor, led small villages or groups of villages. These recognized the influence of a mico,or gran señor, who, in addition to enjoying the respect of oratas, also headed a town of his own. At the apex of the Coosa paramouncy was a “cacique grande” named “Cosa.”38 Apparently, the mico of a paramount town did not need a new title; he simply embodied the town and province over which he ruled.
Such networks enabled Coosa and other leaders with similar resources and wherewithal to integrate neighboring communities and even distant chiefs into larger regional, or paramount, chiefdoms. During his invasion of the Southeast in 1540, Hernando de Soto heard rumors of the “great lord” named “Coça” who had other towns subject to him. De Soto capitalized on Coosa’s regional influence when he kept the chief as a hostage to guarantee the Spaniards safe passage through a host of towns. Only when he reached somewhere in the environs of central Alabama was this chief from northwestern Georgia no longer of any use to him. Another, more localized integration appears in the material record as well. As the town of Coosa became increasingly prominent during the fifteenth century, for example, the pottery styles of neighboring towns converged.39 But did the bonds of hierarchy imply the bondage of commoners? Massive earthworks and the carefully crafted objects they conceal suggest that Mississippian elites claimed a monopoly on the sacred based on ancestry and knowledge of the arcane. Despite mounds’ imposing stature, though, no material remains conclusively illustrate that chiefs exercised power beyond their immediate towns.40 Sixteenth-century explorers claimed that they did, but de Soto and others spoke incessantly about chiefs and their power in part because they were hoping to find another Moctezuma or Atahualpa. Amid the ambiguity and scanty evidence, two perspectives offer some insight into the question of chiefly power.
First, the forms of warfare that secured late Mississippian power were themselves the product of a careful, if also unequal, balance between the interests of leaders and followers. Elites’ inability to control sacred power as effectively as their predecessors had at Etowah, Rood’s Landing, and Moundville meant that warfare served a vital role for maintaining chiefly stability after 1400, but because armies consisted of men who spent most of their time farming, hunting, and making the tools necessary for their subsistence, collective unwillingness could cripple chiefly power. Even when they did serve in massed formations at a chief’s command, individuals sought to distinguish themselves through daring exploits. Individual martial skill provided families with captive slaves. Warriors often displayed the scalps of their victims from the top of a high pole, but rather than place that symbol of their prowess atop the mound of the chief, they erected it in the town’s central plaza. With this act, warriors emphasized their role in a military success that belonged to their community, not their chief.41
But there were limits to the autonomy of warriors. However much fighting men celebrated their actions as victories for their towns and located their most basic loyalties with their homes and the clan members living in them and buried under them, chiefs organized the disciplined warriors who kept tributaries in thrall and Spanish conquistadors off balance. In 1560, Coosa convinced Spanish explorers under Tristan de Luna to join his large military conquest
