Mississippian Specialization and Salt

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Abstract
Despite a tendency to treat Mississippian production as involving specialization, little effort has been made to test these proposals in actual field work. A distinction between specialization at a site and specialization of producers is made in this article and applied to materials from the Great Salt Spring, a Mississippian salt production site in southern Illinois. Testing and excavations in 1981 and 1982 show that this was a true limited activity site. Nonetheless, the data on producer organization do not strongly support the conclusion of specialist production there and are consistent with simpler models of non-specialist production.