From Wickliffe to Jamaica in Search of Chiefdoms
Kit Wesler, Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Geosciences, recently published Excavations at Wickliffe Mounds (University of Alabama Press, 2001), a book that details 70 years of studies at the Wickliffe Mounds site in Ballard County (Kit would like to acknowledge CISR for their Presidential Research Fellowship in support of preparing the book). Wesler has been in charge of research and museum development at the site since MSU accepted it as a donation in 1983. His book includes a CD-ROM that contains analytical contributions by colleagues, a comprehensive description of excavations in the 1930s-1940s and 1980s-2000, and extensive databases. The site and its artifacts are still under analysis, while the Wickliffe Mounds Research Center hosts numerous visitors and school groups every year.
Wesler
never suspected, when he began the Wickliffe project in 1983, that the
work would lead to a research project in Jamaica and a Fulbright professorship
at the University of the West Indies in spring 2002. "One of my colleagues
from my first Fulbright in Nigeria in 1985-86 took a job at UWI a few
years ago and invited me to do a collaborative project," Wesler explained.
"I said… well, okay."
The Taino, the Native American people of
Jamaica, were described by the Spanish in terms very similar to those
for the late Mississippian communities like the one at Wickliffe. They
were both hierarchical cultures, with hereditary chiefs who held power
over large areas. Wesler designed an archaeological project to compare
Taino sites on the north coast of Jamaica to the Wickliffe site, in order
to develop methods for comparison of different cultures through archaeological
data. MSU students as well as UWI students have participated in the excavations.
Wesler will complete his fifth and final
excavation in Jamaica in summer 2003. Meanwhile, he and MSU archaeology
students are studying the Rowlandtown site, near Paducah, a Mississippian
site similar to Wickliffe.
