Andrew Upton

ANDREW J. UPTON, then a graduate student at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, was awarded funding in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Modeling Networks of Interaction, Identification, and Exchange through Mississippian Period Pottery in the US Midwest,’ supervised by Dr. Jodie O’Gorman. This project examines changes in networks of social, economic, and identity politic interaction following a migration process. In particular, the grantee addresses the role of ceramic industry in the transformation of interaction and identification networks across the Middle to Late Mississippian transition in the Late Prehistoric central Illinois River valley (ca. A.D. 1200 – 1450). The integration of three different networks constructed from various relational approaches to ceramic industry examines how chiefly Mississippian social networks structured a circa 1300 A.D. in-migration of tribal Oneota peoples and how communities of agents negotiated multicultural regional cohabitation. Incipient results indicate that Oneota in-migration coincided with 1) increasing regional diversity in social identification categories among Mississippian peoples and a reduced scale of parity in social identification; 2) a shift from global to local cultural transmission of socially mediated jar morphological attributes but a shift from local to global transmission of plate attributes; and 3) a shift from highly cohesive to highly dispersed networks of economic interaction related to ceramic industry. Taken together, these results suggest the development of an internal frontier that like structured Oneota in-migration and provide a corpus for exploring the multi-dimensionality of network interrelationships.