to consider The King as conceivably the descendant of kings of another
sort.^1
Elvis’s rise, meanwhile, occurred in the era of surging postwar pros-
perity, population takeoff, irrepressible bulldozing, and the early stages of
suburban sprawl. The last, especially, brought Mississippians (and many
other Americans) into contact with long-gone native civilizations, or their
archaeological flotsam, unearthed incidentally. It is conceivable that Ver-
non Presley built his Tupelo shotgun house upon a Chickasaw site.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chickasaw towns were centered just
to the west, but the nation (as it would be known in the nineteenth cen-
tury) ranged over much of the eastern Mississippi Black Prairie, north-
ward to the Tennessee River, southward (especially in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries) beyond the west bank of the Tombigbee, encompassing,
that is, present-day West Point to Columbus and more. During the s
and s, meanwhile, as builders of not shotguns but popular ‘‘ranch’’
style houses, new shopping areas, gas stations, and much else, extended
Tupelo southward, workmen and watchful owners-to-be discovered troves
of Chickasaw artifacts as foundations were excavated. The federal Park Ser-
vice collected and preserved Indian remains turned up for a new furniture
factory, but untold and unrecorded bones and materials exposed by con-
struction of Lee Acres subdivision were retained by the new homeowners,
who became private collectors. As late as , an archaeologist attempted
simply to catalog these collections, but most of the suburbanites were un-
cooperative. Still, protected materials from the factory site, the archaeolo-
gist’s limited success in Lee Acres, and professional excavations of nearby
protected sites yield much on the lives of the aboriginals. Archaeology, an-
thropology, and ethnohistory, supported by documents written by Euro-
peans and Americans after contact, collectively present a sweeping, some-
times detailed, usually frustratingly incomplete, often tumultuous, and
ultimately tragic narrative.^2
The Chickasaws’ ancestors were once a small part of the collection of
Woodland cultures that spread all along the Gulf coast and uplands in the
present-day Deep South. The Mesoamerican version of a ‘‘Neolithic revo-
lution’’—the domestication of maize, beans, and squashes (the invention,
that is, of agriculture)—had diffused northward and eastward, revolution-
izing the lifeways of these peoples, then of the Eastern Woodland peoples
who lived to the north. Chickasaws were among the many groups to adopt
farming and become a new ‘‘Mississippian’’ culture. Agriculture turned
hunters-fishers-gatherers into more sedentary and probably healthier peo-