Historic Periods & Themes

Historic Periods & Themes Agriculture (Farming)/Subsistence This theme addresses the different strategies that cultures develop to procure, process, and store food. Beyond the basic studies of site function based on the analysis of a site location, the tool types from the site, and the food remains recovered, this theme also explores the reconstruction of past habitats from the perspective of their potential for human exploitation, caloric studies on the procurement and processing of food, and subsistence strategies over time within and between neighboring regions. Agriculture specifically refers to the process and technology of cultivating soil, producing crops, and raising livestock and plants. Property types for the subsistence/agriculture theme include resources related to food production such as prehistoric villages, small family farmsteads (urban and rural), tenant and sharecropping sites; large plantations with representative or important collections of farm and outbuildings (such as slave quarters, kitchens, icehouses, etc.), and other agricultural complexes such as agri-businesses; sites or properties associated with meat or fruit processing; storage facilities; agricultural fields; animal hunting and kill sites, stockyard, barn, chicken coop, hunting corral, hunting run, or apiary; fishing facilities or sites; horticultural facilities; agricultural outbuildings; and irrigation facilities. Antebellum Mississippi This period explores the decades leading up to the Civil War, a time during which Mississippi witnessed a succession of profound, and often wrenching, changes that remade the state. Through a combination of assimilationist programs, debts accrued at federal trading houses, treaties, and warfare, the United States had gained control of loose pieces of native land, but many native nations—including the Choctaw and Chickasaw—remained entrenched on their lands until the passage of the Indian Removal Act (1830), allowed the national government to purchase the lands of native confederacies and nations residing east of the Mississippi River and to relocate these people to federal lands west of the river. The years between 1832 and 1854 saw the largest population growth in Mississippi's history, and more counties organized than at any other time. Numerous railroads were chartered, sea-going steamboats came upriver to Natchez, and many internal improvements to travel were made. New lands opening, the rise of cotton as a major cash crop, and the means to transport goods easily all led to growing prosperity for the state. However, by 1840 the bubble burst and the state was in financial straits. This "panic" did not last long, and by the 1850s the state was again experiencing prosperity. However, during this time there was growing strife between the northern and southern parts of the state, mainly over the issue of slavery. This mirrored a larger debate in the entire United States. The Mexican War in 1849 aided the pro-slavery party, but the admission of California as a free state in 1850 put the abolitionists ahead in the national congress. When Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the pro-slavery states began to move towards succession from the Union, and in 1861 Mississippi voted to leave. Cemetery/Funerary This theme concerns the investigation of grave sites for demographic data to study population composition, health, and mortality within prehistoric and historic societies. Property types include cemeteries, burial site(s)/ossuary; graves and burials such as a burial cache, burial mound, or grave; and mortuaries such as a mortuary site, funeral home, cremation area, or crematorium. Civil Rights This period explores the American Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and 1960s represents a pivotal event in world history. The positive changes it brought to voting and civil rights continue to be felt throughout the United States and much of the world. Although this struggle for black equality was fought on hundreds of different “battlefields” throughout the United States, many observers at the time described the state of Mississippi as the most racist and violent. Mississippi's lawmakers, law enforcement officers, public officials, and private citizens worked long and hard to maintain the segregated way of life that had dominated the state since the end of the Civil War in 1865. In contrast, the larger Civil Rights Movement can attribute its success to the tactic of nonviolence contrasting with the exposure of violence-prone policemen, sheriffs, vigilante groups, and other defenders of the status quo. Depression Era This period explores the collapse of the U.S. stock market in 1929, signaling the onset of the Great Depression, a worldwide economic calamity that would persist through the 1930s, forcing farm families deeper into poverty, debt, illness, hunger and despair. Planters, tenants, and sharecroppers watched helplessly as farm income dwindled from $191 million in 1929 to a mere $41 million in 1932. Moreover, any discussion of the farmer’s dilemma after 1930 must include crimes of nature: boll weevils; the floods of 1927, 1932, and 1936; and the great southern drought of 1930–31. The state’s tiny manufacturing sector also suffered. Between 1929 and 1932, 1,165 small plants, more than 800 of them sawmills, ceased operations. The number of jobs in lumbering, fishing, manufacturing, and railroading dropped from 52,000 in 1929 to 28,000 in 1932, and payrolls dropped from $42 million to $14 million. In turn, the lack of consumer purchasing power devastated the state’s retail business. With agriculture, manufacturing, and retail sales languishing, the banking system—never one of the nation’s strongest—began to buckle. Property values shrank to their lowest level since 1850, payrolls dropped, and savings deposits fell by 50 percent from 1930 to 1933. Bank failures began in 1930, when fifty-nine banks went under, followed by fifty-six in 1931 and twelve in 1932. Unemployment figures fluctuated throughout the decade. Some indication of the serious nature of unemployment emerges from the fact that by June 1943, when the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration was liquidated, $117 million had been allocated for the state, mostly for wages. Significant recovery did not begin until 1936, when Gov. Hugh L. White’s Balance Agriculture with Industry initiatives joined the massive injection of federal money into Mississippi by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal ($450 million from 1933 to 1939). The onset of World War II brought robust economic growth and a modicum of social reform that neither Mississippi’s political leaders nor New Deal largesse could achieve. Education This theme relates to the process of conveying or acquiring knowledge or skills through systematic instruction, training, or study, whether through public or private efforts. Potential site types include schools (single or multiple structures, trade or technical facilities), academies, research facilities, colleges (universities, community, junior colleges), libraries, education- related resources (dormitory, housing, boarding school, etc.). In general, little archaeological material is found related to educational activities at typical domestic assemblages. On school sites in particular, many objects associated with school life (notebooks, paper, etc.) are not likely to have survived while other objects such as lunchboxes, backpacks, books, etc. were taken to and from school and will most likely not be found within the archaeological record. Typical finds include items pencils and erasers, inkwells, desk frames, chalk and slate, fountain ink pen that when combined with archaeological excavation, oral histories and documentary sources provide insights into access to and extent of instructional and/or vocational training. Ethnicity/Immigration This theme explores the material manifestations of ethnic diversity and the movement and interaction of people of different ethnic heritages through time and space in Mississippi. While all property types may be associated with this theme, properties that exemplify the ethos of immigrant or ethnic groups, the distinctive cultural traditions of peoples that migrated and/or were transplanted to Mississippi (i.e. Asian-American, African-American, French, German, Spanish, etc.), or the dominant aspirations of an ethnic group are of particular interest (i.e. Blues). Also related to this theme are sites associated with persons of distinctive ethnic heritage who made a significant contribution to our history and culture in any field of human endeavor. Historic Indian This theme addresses and recognizes American Indian tribal groups with historic associations with Mississippi, the most recognizable amongst them being the Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. With the arrival of Spanish, French, and English settlers in the New World, native societies in the region connected with the Atlantic market economy, a source for guns, blankets, and many other trade items. Europeans offered these trade materials in exchange for Indian slaves and deerskins, currencies that radically altered the relationships between tribal groups. Smallpox and other diseases followed along the trading paths. Colonial competition between the French and English helped spark the Natchez rebellion, the Chickasaw–French wars, the Choctaw civil war, and a half-century of client warfare between the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced Mississippi’s pro-French tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. The Diaspora included the Tunicas, Houmas, Pascagoulas, Biloxis, and a portion of the Choctaw confederacy. In the early nineteenth century, Mississippi’s remaining Choctaws and Chickasaws faced a series of treaties with the United States government that ended in destitution and removal. Despite the intense pressures of European invasion and U.S. duplicity, the Mississippi tribes survived by adapting and contributing to their rapidly evolving world. Industrial/Commercial This theme explores the technology and process of managing materials, labor, and equipment to produce and trade goods, services, and commodities. Included in this theme are activities related to the extraction, production, and processing of materials such as quarrying, mining, manufacturing, lumbering, technology, electronics, pottery, textiles, food processing, distilling, fuel, building materials, tools, transportation, seafood, and many other industries. Industrial site types include quarries, mills (grist, carding, textile, and woodworking), factories, distilleries, shipyards, mines, forges and furnaces, kilns, laboratories, power plants, dams, tanneries, village shops, and other small crafts and industrial sites. Commercial site types include businesses, professional, organizational, and financial institutions, and specialty stores; and department stores, restaurants, warehouses, and trade sites. Landscape/Landscape Features This theme explores the historic, cultural, scenic, visual, and design qualities of cultural landscapes, emphasizing the reciprocal relationships affecting the natural and the human-built environment. Investigations include studies into spatial organizational patterns, land use, response to natural features, circulation networks, boundaries, vegetation, clustered arrangements of buildings, fences, and paths, structures, and small-scale landscape elements. Associated property types include not only deliberately designed or maintained landscapes such as parking lots, parks, plazas, gardens, street furniture, and objects, conservation areas, and rural historic districts but also unoccupied land, underwater sites, and natural features such as a mountain, valley, promontory, tree, river, island, pond, or lake. Military This theme relates to the system of defending the territory and sovereignty of a people and encompasses all military activities, battles, strategic locations, and events important in military history. It includes property types related to arms production and storage (i.e. magazine, gun manufactory, or armory); fortifications (prehistoric [palisaded village] and historic [batteries, bunkers]); military facilities; battle sites (battlefield); coast guard facilities (lighthouse, coast guard station, pier, dock, etc.); naval facilities; air facilities (landing strips, hangers, etc.); and prisoner of war camps/locales. Included within this theme are Civil War resources. Given Mississippi's location along the strategic Mississippi River made the state a scene of a number of major battles inside its boundaries or nearby. The names Vicksburg, Jackson, Raymond, Port Gibson, Corinth, Iuka, and Meridian resonate in Civil War historical writing as do nearby Shiloh, New Orleans, Memphis, and Port Hudson. Post Reconstruction This period explores the political and social climate immediately following the end Reconstruction in 1875 through the turn of the twentieth century. Due to a number of factors, including the physical devastation of the various military campaigns across the state, the freeing of the slaves, and the political corruption of the Reconstruction era, Mississippi’s economy was in ruins by the 1870s. Poverty was rampant across the state and affected all social classes, particularly newly freed blacks, and many farmers went bankrupt. The practices of tenant farming and sharecropping became widespread and entrenched in the state, further degrading the economy and increasing the level of individual poverty. The loss of the slave labor force throughout the South, combined with severe financial setbacks suffered by Southern states as the defeated party, necessitated changes in the overall economic system, giving rise to the development and growth of the tenant farming/sharecropping. The reorganization that occurred was primarily based on changes in the relationship between management and labor, and resulted in the broad dispersion of smaller, individual farmsteads (share-croppers and tenant farmers) within the former boundaries of the plantation. Former slaves and non-landholding whites ultimately became a part of this new system wherein farmland was rented for cash or a share of the seasonal yield. Shifts in settlement related to plantation reorganization apparently occurred throughout the state. The nucleated form of settlement found on antebellum plantations continued to predominate until freedmen acquired (1) freedom from direct control and continuous supervision; (2) their own homes in proximity to cropland at least functionally, if not nominally under their control; and (3) use and control of mules. As these aspects of freedom were slowly realized, freed blacks were able to move away from the planation village complex and occupy outlying tracts within the planter’s holdings. As the industrial revolution continued, European demand for American cotton grew. The South responded to this demand, producing about 10,000,000 more bales of cotton in the four years preceding 1881 than it had during the 15 years immediately preceding the Civil War. Apparently the tenant farm system was more efficient at producing cotton than was the slave labor system. However, a persistent problem with tenancy was its creation of impoverished white and black farmers, forced to mortgage future crops for present needs. In years when crops failed, these farmers went deeper into debt. Not until World War II (1939-1945), when widespread mechanization of cotton production made sharecropping unprofitable, did the economy begin to improve and the system of share-cropping begin to disappear. Pre-World War II Mississippi (1900-1941) This period explores the first four decades of the twentieth century and the rapid social and economic changes that preceded World War II. Shortly after the turn of the century, growing agitation and dissatisfaction among small farmers led to the growth of the Populist Movement and the temporary ousting of the Democrats from power. The success of the combined Populist/Republican party was short-lived, however. With the adoption of popular primary elections, Democrats won back the legislature and governorship of the state by promising new reforms, espousing racist rhetoric, and ranting against the control of the economy by Northern banks, railroads, and other corporate interests. Several reforms, including larger budgets for education, lighter tax burdens on small farmers, state regulation of railroads, banks, and other corporate enterprises, and reform of the state penal system, were enacted during the initial decades of the twentieth century. Mississippi’s economy had only started to recover by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. To counteract the rapid decline of the economy, federal farm programs associated with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) encouraged better soil conservation 38 practices and greater crop diversification. The state government focused on industrial growth, creating the Balance Agriculture With Industry (BAWI) program in 1936, which enabled state and local governments to issue bonds for the construction of industrial plants to be leased to private industries. The addition of tax incentives for some industries resulted in a moderate increase in the industrial section by 1940. During World War II, the state’s mild climate attracted the Army and Air Force, which constructed a number of camps and bases such as Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg and Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. Ingalls Shipbuilding at Pascagoula helped create a wartime economic boom on the Gulf Coast; the availability of jobs with good wages brought former sharecroppers into the towns. Agricultural production to support the war effort and to help U.S. allies also helped improve the profitability of both large and small farming operations such that, when the war ended, most farmers had surplus funds that could be used for mechanization. Post World War II Mississippi (1942-present) This period explores the elements that shaped modern Mississippi (excluding Civil Rights, which is its own period of emphasis). After World War II, federal crop subsidies and high commodity prices added to the farmers’ surpluses, and mechanization of Mississippi’s farms began in earnest. Tractors, mechanical cotton pickers, and combines drastically reduced the need for field labor, resulting in the dispossession of tenants and the gradual centralization of small farms under single owners. By 1990, the typical farm in Mississippi consisted of hundreds of acres maintained by a small workforce, with the percentage of the population engaged in farming representing only 2.7 percent compared to 75 percent in 1900. The introduction of herbicides, defoliants, and pesticides increased the yield and health of most crops, and allowed for greater diversification. Cotton, although still an important crop in the state, no longer dominated the agricultural economy. Soybeans, rice, poultry, and catfish together produced more than twice as much income. Faced with the challenge of employing the work force formerly employed on the state’s farms, every governor since World War II has encouraged industrialization to bring more industrial jobs to the state. In 1951, 40 new plants providing 5,200 new jobs located in Mississippi and, by 1965, industrial employment passed agricultural employment for the first time. By 1990, almost 23 percent of the work force worked in factories, while approximately 32 percent worked in the trade and service industries. The largest employers were manufacturers of clothing, food products, furniture, and lumber and wood products; and processors of agricultural products (poultry and catfish) and wood products (paper and pulp mills, furniture). Centers of heavy industry have arisen along the Gulf Coast and in cities along the Mississippi River like Natchez, Vicksburg, and Greenville. Protohistoric Period The protohistoric period, where the late prehistoric period and the early historic one overlap in a limbo that in the Southeast covers the hiatus between earliest exploration and first permanent settlement by Europeans. Before and during the protohistoric period Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed, whether from internal causes or from introduced European disease. The social disruption that resulted from such collapse led to population movements and consolidations in a search for a renewal of stability. New mechanisms for exercising power arose among the native population, mechanisms directly connected to the exploitation of the new European element. The context of the protohistoric period, then, is an ideal one for the study of rapid--even drastic-- culture change, and an explanation of what happened to Indian groups during this period is crucial to an understanding of why their successors differed so radically from the populations of the prehistoric Mississippian period. There has been a tendency to explain this radical difference simply by the effects of European contact, but considerable evidence is beginning to suggest that the older notion of a “Mississippian Decline,” a natural exhaustion of Mississippian culture, may not be entirely incorrect, and that some Mississippian groups had begun to reorganize before contact. Reconstruction This period explores the time period relating to the reconstruction and recovery process Mississippi experienced following the Civil War. As part of a plan to restore the Union, in 1865, President Andrew Johnson appointed William L. Sharkey as provisional governor of Mississippi. Under Sharkey’s direction, a new state constitution abolishing slavery was drafted. A new state government, composed largely of former Confederates, was elected in October of that year, and promptly enacted the Black Code that reimposed many of the restrictions on freed blacks, including disenfranchisement. In response, the Radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress wrested control of the Reconstruction process from Johnson and, in 1867, imposed military rule across the South. Republican politicians, many relocated from the North, took control of the state government. Readmission to the Union was made conditional on the adoption of new constitutions that removed the restrictions on freed blacks and gave them the right to vote and old public office. After several tries, a state constitution acceptable to Congress was finally approved by the electorate in 1869. Mississippi was formally readmitted to the Union on February 23, 1870. In the 1870s, as former Confederates began to receive federal pardons that allowed them to once again hold public office, the Democratic Party began to take back control of the state government from the Republicans. The relatively rapid rise to power of the Democrats during this period was in part attributed to the hatred of the electorate for what they saw as outsiders and exploiters and in part to the intimidation of blacks and Republicans by terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. In the elections of 1875, Democrats gained control of the state legislature, and in 1876, replaced the Republican Governor and Lieutenant Governor with Democrats. The Democratic Party remained in power throughout most of the next century. Technology/Engineering Theme While the technological aspects of a culture form the primary basis of interpretation of all themes, this theme relates primarily to the utilization of and evolutionary changes in material culture as a society adapts to its physical, biological, and cultural environments. Research questions here range from artifact studies on the identification of changing tool types, their various functions, and how they were manufactured to more general issues related to the organization of labor and presence/absence of craft or occupational specialization. All site types may contribute to the understanding of this theme. This theme also involves the practical application of scientific principles to design, construct, and operate equipment, machinery, and structures to serve human needs. Property types include wood, metal, and concrete bridges, highways, dams, canals, railroads, air-transport, and other transportation-related works, and various industrial structures, engines, and machinery. Transportation/Communication Theme This theme relates to the process and technology of conveying passengers, materials, and information. Studies focus on transportation and communication networks involving roads, water, canals, railroads, and air as well as on the various structures, vehicles, equipment, and technology associated with each mode. Property types may be generally classified as either rail- related, air-related, water-related, road-related, or pedestrian-related. Examples include railroads, stations, depots, engine houses, and trains; airports, airplanes, landing fields, and space vehicles; and research facilities associated with transportation systems; boats and other watercraft, piers, and wharves, ferries, lighthouses; canals and associated structures, locks, boats; roads and turnpikes, tollhouses, automobiles and other vehicles such as streetcars; and boardwalks, walkways, and trails.