University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 1-1-2019 Crafting stone discoidals on the frontier: production and identity in southwest Virginia Hamilton Hastie Bryant Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons, and the Geographic Information Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Bryant, Hamilton Hastie, "Crafting stone discoidals on the frontier: production and identity in southwest Virginia" (2019). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1742. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1742 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CRAFTING STONE DISCOIDALS ON THE FRONTIER: PRODUCTION AND IDENTITY IN SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology The University of Mississippi by HAMILTON HASTIE BRYANT III August 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Hamilton H. Bryant III All rights reserved ABSTRACT Stone discoidals are widely recognized as a class of artifacts associated with Mississippian cultural traditions and even some of its various descendant communities. Excavations at the Carter Robinson site, a Fourteenth Century Mississippian frontier site in Lee County, Virginia, have revealed evidence of the production of stone discoidals. Although craft production in Mississippian societies has been the subject of much debate, little to no attention has been given to the production of stone discoidals. The purpose of this thesis is to explicate the method of stone discoidal production at Carter Robinson, and to explore how this production was organized overtime at the site, in order to better understand what role this production played in the political economy of this frontier chiefdom.