Foodways in the Yazoo: Integrating Faunal and Floral Analyses at Parchman Place

Parchman Place is a Mississippi period mound site in the Yazoo Basin region of Mississippi. Archaeological excavations at this site have revealed a series of neighborhoods with unusually good preservation of faunal and floral remains.  In order to interpret these deposits, we combine faunal and floral analyses to reach a more holistic understanding of the foodways of the people who lived at Parchman.  As analysis is ongoing, we limit our scope to remains from a large midden that was a part of Neighborhood 1.  This midden contains multiple dumping episodes, a number of which are sealed by occupational floors.  The discrete nature of these stratigraphic units gives us the opportunity to perform fine-grained analyses, through which we examine both seasonal patterns and patterns occurring vertically through time.