Arctic Taphonomy

Welcome Sign, Barrow, Alaska

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days in Barrow, Alaska, which is a really fascinating place in a whole bunch of ways. It’s certainly unlike any other place I’ve ever seen, either in Alaska or outside it. The coexistence of a vigorous tradition of subsistence whaling with a huge influx of money from the North Slope oil fields, combined with the presence of numerous scientists and other researchers stationed at the former Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) gives the place a mixture of cultures and perspectives that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. The unpaved streets and rough wooden facades of the buildings in Barrow belie the extremely sophisticated infrastructure supporting them.

The modern community of Barrow descends from the ancient Inupiat village known as Utqiagvik (also known as Ukpiagvik), and a portion of the old village is still visible as ruins within the modern city. There’s not much to see except a series of low mounds representing old houses, but some of the mounds still have bits of  the whale bone supports of the houses protruding, which is interesting. Much of Utqiagvik has been excavated, and an interesting article by Georgeanne Lewis Reynolds published in 1995 explains some of the lessons learned for archaeology more generally from the excavations at this site. Reynold’s approach falls within the “behavioral archaeology” school established by Michael Schiffer at the University of Arizona, which emphasizes the “formation processes” that lead to the archaeological record as it uncovered in excavations. The basic idea behind this is that what we see in a site when it is excavated is usually not a “snapshot” of daily life at a given moment in the past, a la Pompeii; instead, it is usually a sort of palimpsest of a variety of activities in a given location over time, further complicated by natural processes that occurred after the final human use of the site that serve to further obscure human activities. This general area of study is known within archaeology by the term “taphonomy” (itself taken from paleontology), although Reynolds does not use this term in her article.

Welcome Sign at Utqiagvik Site, Barrow, Alaska

As Reynolds points out, these natural processes are particularly important in the Arctic, where freeze-thaw cycles lead to major movements of soil layers and associated artifacts, coastal erosion destroys significant parts of sites like Utqiagvik located on coastal bluffs, and the sudden movement of large blocks of ice onto the bluff top, known in Inupiaq as ivu, can catastrophically destroy anything in the ice’s path. One famous ivu at Utqiagvik appears to have killed the well-known “frozen family” at Mound 44, preserving in place a Pompeii-like scene of domestic life that has provided details of ancient domestic life not generally available, but at the cost of also destroying much other evidence about the house on account of its destructive nature.

As for cultural formation processes, Reynolds identifies abandonment and reuse of structures as the main processes that can be detected at Utqiagvik. Many house mounds were abandoned, with most of the usable artifacts and bulding materials in them either taken away by the inhabitants who left or scavenged later by others, with the result that few conclusions about specific uses of space within the structures can be made. Some of these were later reused, which adds additional complications to interpretation.

Whale Bone House Support Protruding from Mound at Utqiagvik

Ultimately, Reynolds concludes that formation processes are more easily determined at sites like this at the level of architectural units (i.e., houses), rather than at the level of individual artifacts. All the formation processes she describes have a tendency to move artifacts away from their original locations where they were used, meaning that few conclusions about artifact use or social practices can be made from the locations where artifacts were excavated. The overall assemblage of artifacts from a given structure is a more reliable guide to the use of that structure in general, although even here processes such as abandonment and reuse complicates the picture for any given time period.

This may all seem fairly obvious, but it actually constitutes a fairly strong critique of the influential approach to archaeological inference promoted most famously by Lewis Binford, whose “processual” approach (part of the “New Archaeology” he and others spearheaded in the 1960s) depends crucially on the ability of archaeologists to draw wide-ranging conclusions about prehistoric societies based in part on the distribution of artifacts in excavated sites. Schiffer’s focus on the ways the archaeological record was actually formed is an important reality check on this approach, emphasizing that these sorts of conclusions can really only be made when certain specific conditions obtain. Reynolds’s paper serves largely to apply this general approach to the exceptionally complicated situation in the Arctic, where things are not necessarily as they seem.

Mounds at Utqiagvik, Looking toward Downtown Barrow, Alaska

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The Big One

Earthquake Park, Anchorage, Alaska

On this date in 1964, which happened to be Good Friday, the largest earthquake in US history struck Southcentral Alaska. With its epicenter in Prince William Sound and its magnitude measured as 8.6 or even higher on the Richter Scale, the Good Friday earthquake caused massive destruction throughout the region. The nearby town of Valdez was completely destroyed and later rebuilt on a different, less seismically vulnerable site. Other towns such as Seward and Whittier didn’t suffer that fate, but 13 of the 70 residents of Whittier died in the quake and the following tsunami, and port facilities both there and in Seward suffered so much damage that they have never fully recovered their economic importance.

Anchorage, which was a bit further away, suffered somewhat less, although it was still hit hard. Indeed, its port managed to stay open in the aftermath of the quake and tsunami, which was one of the factors making Anchorage become the main economic center for the region and the whole state in the following years. This is not to say that the earthquake wasn’t a major disaster for Anchorage as well, however. The city was built on sediments that turned out to be pretty vulnerable to shifting when hit with an impact of that scale, and parts of the downtown were literally torn apart. An upscale residential area known as Turnagain Heights suffered a landslide so devastating that the city, rather than attempt to rebuild, designated it as a park. It is now aptly named Earthquake Park, and while there isn’t much obvious evidence of the effects of the earthquake anymore, there are interpretive signs that tell the story quite effectively.

Sign Describing Turnagain Heights Landslide, Earthquake Park

Earthquakes are a fact of life in Alaska, which just north of the area where the Pacific Plate slides under the North American Plate (known as the Aleutian Trench). This movement is continual, but it only occasionally occurs in the form of massive slips of the sort that cause earthquakes on the scale of the one in 1964. The more usual effect is to warp and compress the land of Southcentral Alaska. This warping, along with other factors such as glaciation, leads to complicated changes in sea level over time, changes which can vary substantially in areas only a few miles apart.

And that, in turn, greatly complicates study of the archaeological record of Alaska. Rising sea level typically destroys archaeological sites (although in certain very specific circumstances it may instead preserve them in excellent condition), and changes in sea level over time may make sites from a given time period difficult to locate even if they haven’t been submerged. Furthermore, cultures of coastal Alaska have generally been oriented toward the sea, with settlements typically located fairly close to wherever the coastline was at the time. This means that sea-level fluctuations have even more profound impacts on understanding the archaeological record here than they might in some other areas.

Interpretive Signs at Earthquake Park

These factors are illustrated dramatically in a 1996 article by Aron Crowell and Daniel Mann reporting on research in Kenai Fjords and Katmai National Parks attempting to carefully document sea-level changes and their effects on the archaeological record. These two parks are not very far from each other, being about 200 miles apart and both located on the coast of the Gulf of Alaska, but their geological and cultural histories differ dramatically. Kenai Fjords, as its name implies, is dominated by coastal fjords created when rising sea level inundated glacial valleys. Its archaeological record is sparse and limited to the past few centuries.

Katmai, on the other hand, has a relatively stable coastline and an enormously rich and well-documented archaeological record dating back several thousand years. Much of what is known about the archaeology of southwestern Alaska is based on long-term research in various parts of Katmai by Don Dumond of the University of Oregon from the 1950s through the 1980s, and there has been considerable additional research since then. The cultural sequence in this area closely parallels that of the nearby Kodiak Archipelago, which was one of the most densely populated parts of Alaska when the Russians arrived in the eighteenth century. The Kenai Fjords area, on the other hand, had a much lower density at this time, as did Prince William Sound further east, with which it has many similarities. This lower density has been plausibly attributed to lower resource productivity in these areas, but Crowell and Mann point out that the extremely low density of prehistoric archaeological sites in Kenai Fjords is perhaps also due to geological processes and seal level change.

Welcome Sign, Earthquake Park

To investigate the differences between the two parks, Crowell and Mann intensively investigated certain parts of each, with intriguing results. One of the areas investigated in Kenai Fjords was a narrow sand spit with a series of beach ridges containing a total of four archaeological sites (most dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the earliest about 500 years old) and a small tidal pond surrounded by trees killed when the 1964 earthquake caused the land to drop about one meter, exposing their roots to the seawater that permeates the sandy soil. This same seawater also fills the pond, so the sediments in and around it could be interpreted as a record of changes in relative sea level over time. Digging down in search of radiocarbon-datable material, the archaeologists found a series of buried tree stumps 1.8 meters below the present surface that seemed to have been killed in a sudden cataclysm surprisingly similar to what happened in 1964. Six radiocarbon samples taken from the bark of these stumps gave dates that were statistically identical and averaged out to about AD 1170.

This strongly suggests that there was a major earthquake at least as strong as the Good Friday one in or around 1170. This is consistent with evidence from several other parts of the region, where other studies have found less precise evidence for major geological changes around this time. The implication for the issue of archaeological site preservation is that any coastal sites in this area predating 1170 would have been destroyed by the earthquake. Since the geomorphology of Kenai Fjords means that the only usable settlement locations here are on low coastal sand spits like this one, this earthquake probably completely destroyed the previous archaeological record. This would explain why there are so few sites in the park, and why they basically all date to the late prehistoric period or later. The relatively low productivity and other drawbacks of the area may well have limited population earlier as well, but with the earthquake having destroyed any evidence of what was going on previously there’s no way to know for sure.

Sign Describing the Good Friday Earthquake, Earthquake Park

Katmai was a different story, however. Crowell and Mann discovered 22 new sites there in the course of this project (as compared to 16 sites total in Kenai Fjords documented by this and other projects), suggesting that further survey along the coast will likely reveal even more as yet unknown sites in this very productive area. Interestingly, many of the sites they found were located away from the present coastline, often in uplifted areas that may have been coastal at times of higher sea level than at present. Radiocarbon dates from these sites and from peats in the intertidal zone allowed Crowell and Mann to reconstruct a tentative sea level curve for much of the past several thousand years, with the main conclusion being that sea level has been pretty consistent over the past 4000 years, with a slight rise sometime in the past couple hundred years, possibly as a result of subsidence of land in the 1964 earthquake. (Crowell and Mann don’t discuss the possibility that global sea level rise as a result of climate change may be another explanation for this, but it strikes me as plausible.) In any case, whatever the source of this slight recent rise in sea level, it had few apparent effects on archaeological site preservation beyond contributing to the exceptional preservation of one waterlogged site. The subsidence from the 1964 earthquake was very slight in this area, and this appears to have been true for the 1170 one as well. The rich archaeological record of the Katmai coast, then, appears to be in part a function of the relative stability of sea level in this area over thousands of years, in striking contrast to areas just a few hundred miles away.

The archaeological record is always incomplete, and any conclusions drawn from it have to be tempered by knowledge of that incompleteness. As this paper demonstrates very effectively, however, the factors determining just how much of the past is left for us to study vary a lot, especially in places like Alaska where the forces of the earth are exceptionally active. The modern population of Alaska learned just how active those forces can be in 1964, and it stands to reason that the ancient population learned the same lesson in 1170.

"Living with Earthquakes" Sign, Earthquake Park

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Mississippian Burial Practices

The Twin Mounds from Monks Mound, Cahokia

One of the major areas of interest for the “New Archaeologists” who came to dominate American archaeology in the late twentieth century was mortuary analysis. In keeping with the arguments of Lewis Binford and other leaders of the movement that archaeology as a discipline should be “problem-oriented” and focused on reconstruction prehistoric societies as fully as possible using archaeological evidence, the patterning evident in the way those societies disposed of their dead was held to reveal important information about social structure and the positions held by the deceased in life. Many important studied of mortuary behavior in various cultures were published in this period, including a 1984 article by George Milner on the burial patterns of Mississippian sites in the American Bottom of southwestern Illinois.

Milner’s article is a classic example of the New Archaeology as applied to mortuary patterns, hampered only slightly by the immense complexity of Mississippian mortuary behavior and the scanty evidence from the many burials excavated in the nineteenth century and poorly documented. Noting that most Mississippian burials in this area were placed in dedicated cemetery areas, he divides these cemeteries into three broad categories, reflecting two dimensions of variation in social structure. The categories are elite burials at major centers such as Cahokia, non-elite burials at those same centers, and non-elite burials at peripheral sites (which do not appear to contain elite burials).

By far the most and best information available to Milner was from the third category, and this is the one he focuses the most attention on. There is quite a bit of diversity even within this category of cemetery, but some general patterns do emerge. Cemetery sites are typically either on prominent bluffs above the Mississippi River floodplain or on low ridges within the floodplain, with a trend apparent over time of a shift from the former to the latter. The bluff-top cemeteries tend to be quite large, and they probably represent the dead of multiple rural communities in the general area. This inference is backed up by the diversity of mortuary treatments even within these cemeteries. Some burials are intact, articulated skeletons, often laid out in one or more rows, sometimes with the heads pointing toward a nearby mound center. Others are disarticulated jumbles or bones, often containing the remains of multiple individuals. There is considerable evidence of complicated mortuary treatment involving exposure of the bodies for some period after death, perhaps in the “charnel structures” that accompany some of the cemeteries, followed by secondary burial. Grave goods are rare and usually relatively mundane items such as pottery, although shell beads and certain exotic minerals are found in some cases.

Ironically, burials at the major mound sites are generally poorly documented compared to those in the rural hinterland. This is in part because the former were often excavated haphazardly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with little or no detailed documentation, while the latter have been largely excavated by systematic cultural resource management salvage projects more recently and extensively documented. Nevertheless, Milner combed through the available data on the mound center burials in the American Bottom, and he comes to a few tentative conclusions about them.

For one thing, there is definitely a big difference between the elite and non-elite burials. The non-elite burials are similar to the ones at outlying sites in many ways, including linear arrangements of graves and modest assemblages of grave goods, but there is also more substantial variation in mortuary treatment, which Milner plausibly attributes to greater diversity within the more populous mound communities, perhaps including more subtle gradations of status than are accounted for by his crude “elite”/”non-elite” dichotomy.

Sign Describing the Twin Mounds at Cahokia

The elite burials, however, are quite different. They are generally in mounds, specifically in conical mounds as opposed to the flat-topped ones that served as platforms for buildings. A common pattern seen at Cahokia and other sites, is for mounds to be paired, with a conical mound accompanying a platform mound. The Fox and Roundtop mounds (the so-called “Twin Mounds”), south of Monks Mound on the opposite side of the Grand Plaza, are the best-known of these paired mounds, but since they are largely unexcavated relatively little is known of their contents. Much of the Cahokia data Milner uses comes instead from Mound 72, which was excavated relatively recently and extensively documented. The very complicated mortuary deposits in this mound include two burials associated with numerous shell beads, as well as various other groups of both articulated and disarticulated remains. One group of articulated skeletons was missing skulls and hands, apparently indicating some sort of human sacrifice.

One of the most striking ways the elite burials differ from the non-elite ones is in the sorts of grave goods. Mundane items such as pottery are generally rare, while very elaborate, labor-intensive artifacts are numerous. The shell beads from Mound 72, also common in several of the other mounds Milner discusses, are one example. Mound 72 also contained various other items, including a cache of finely made chert projectile points, and other exotic materials including copper items were found in other mound burials.

Another interesting characteristic of the elite burials Milner describes is that they are quite communal in nature. Individual burials are not present, and even the most elaborate assemblages of grave goods seem to be associated with large groups of burials within the mounds. This may have important implications for the nature of political power in Mississippian society, although Milner doesn’t go into the implications in any detail in this paper.

Some of Milner’s conclusions in this paper have been superseded in part by newer discoveries and refinements to the chronology of the American Bottom since the time he wrote, but this is still an important paper, not least because of the way it draws on what information is available on the early excavations. The tentative nature of Milner’s conclusions is due in part to those data limitations, but also to the fact that what becomes glaringly obvious from this work is that Mississippian burial practices were extremely complicated and shaped by a wide variety of possible factors, not all of them easily discernible from this type of study.

Milner, G. (1984). Social and Temporal Implications of Variation among American Bottom Mississippian Cemeteries American Antiquity, 49 (3) DOI: 10.2307/280355

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Mississippian Houses

Reconstructed House, Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma

Mississippian societies are best known for their mound centers, with Cahokia in Illinois being the largest and most impressive but by no means the only one. These sites have drawn the interest of archaeologists since the very beginning of American archaeology as a field of study, but the focus on mounds meant that other aspects of Mississippian culture got relatively little attention until much later.

One of these aspects was domestic architecture. While Mississippian mounds, unlike those of many earlier societies in the Eastern Woodlands, often served at least in part as platforms for elite residences, the fact that both these and more humble dwellings were made of perishable materials and did not survive in the damp conditions of the region led their subtle remains to be largely ignored until well into the twentieth century. At this time archaeology as a discipline was rapidly professionalizing, and archaeologists began to shift their focus from acquiring impressive specimens for museum display to investigating the remains of ancient societies in an attempt to understand them as totalities, including the more humble parts.

Partially Reconstructed House, Angel Mounds, Evansville, Indiana

When it came to Mississippian residential architecture, what these newer, more careful excavations revealed was that Mississippian houses were relatively flimsy, at least as compared to the impressive stone architecture of the Southwest and Mexico. Indeed, masonry architecture was apparently totally unknown in the East throughout the prehistoric period, even in areas near outcrops of useful stone. The conception thus entered the archaeological literature that the Mississippians, for all their effort at building mounds, didn’t do much to build substantial houses.

This is kind of a misleading way to think about it, however, as John Bennett of the University of Chicago pointed out in a 1944 article. As he put it:

There can be no doubt that a dwelling or ceremonial structure built of such perishable materials as wood, canes, and grass thatch is hardly as durable or lasting as a stone building. From the standpoint of preservation such construction is “flimsy.” This interpretation unfortunately implies, however, that this architecture was flimsy in terms of its own cultural setting. That is, it represented a poor attempt at sheltering and housing the people.

Bennett goes on to argue that this is a mistaken conclusion to draw, basing his remarks on his institution’s recent excavations at the Kincaid site in southern Illinois, which had exceptionally well-preserved remains of burned houses. Basically, he argues that while the individual materials may have been flimsy, they were put together in an ingenious way that gave the result structures plenty of strength and durability for their intended purposes:

Walls were constructed by placing poles or saplings in a trench and bending these over at the top to produce a peaked or domed roof. Horizontal poles were lashed to the sides, to produce a lattice. Reeds were then lashed to the lattice. The next step was to plaster a thick layer of clay on both sides of this lattice, over the reeds, then to cover this clay with a matted layer of grass fibers. The final step was to cover this grass with cane mats—large and thick for the outside, thinner for the inside. The wall thus formed was nearly one foot thick, and obviously very rigid—hardly a “flimsy” structure.

There was actually quite a bit of variation within the Mississippian tradition in house construction; some areas had straight-walled houses with gabled thatch roofs, while others had houses with more of a curved shape. This basic pattern of wall trenches filled with upright poles which were then covered with some sort of wattle-and-daub was widespread, however, and in some areas the appearance of wall trenches is considered a sign of the beginning of the Mississippian period. It’s true that these houses didn’t last very long and had to be replaced frequently (which has been used in some cases to estimate occupation spans and population totals at certain sites), but any type of construction short of stone masonry would have this drawback in the rainy East. Given that these houses would have provided quite useful shelter with relatively little effort, they seem quite well suited to their context.

Kincaid Mounds, Massac County, Illinois

Speaking of stone, though, why didn’t they use it? Some sites in alluvial plains wouldn’t necessarily have had nearby sources of stone, but this isn’t the case for Kincaid and many other sites. As it turns out, Bennett has an answer to this too:

The proximity of Kincaid to stone outcrops in the hills might make us wonder why the Indians never utilized stone for building materials. The answer is twofold: (1) The southeastern cultural tradition did not include such a trait, and (2) the climate and frequent floods in the bottoms required just such a structure as described. The architecture can be considered as a nearly perfect adaptation to the environment.

It’s interesting to see here, given the early date of Bennett’s article, that he hits on both of the major categories of explanation that have dominated archaeology in recent decades: environmental determinism and cultural specificity. Neither is necessarily all that convincing on its own, but between the two of them they probably cover whatever the true answer was. It’s noteworthy that when Europeans began to settle eastern North America they mostly didn’t build with stone either, instead preferring wood until well into the nineteenth century when cities grew to such a size that local wood resources became scarce and fire became a major concern. This even though they, unlike the indigenous tribes, did have a cultural tradition of building in stone which reached quite a high degree of elaboration in the castles and cathedrals of medieval Europe.

Closeup of Kincaid Mounds Mural, Paducah, Kentucky

One way to interpret this information is to posit that building with stone is sufficiently difficult that people are only going to do it when they have few other options, as in arid regions with little wood and when local wood resources have been largely exhausted. In the forests of the Eastern Woodlands this was never really a problem during the prehistoric period (and well into the historic), so people just built with wood and other easily available materials. Even for monumental purposes, such as mound-building, they used dirt rather than bothering with stone. Ironically, this meant that everything they built except the mounds eventually rotted away in the wet climate, so their ingenuity in this regard wasn’t discovered until rather recently.

Bennett, J. (1944). A Note on Middle Mississippi Architecture American Antiquity, 9 (3) DOI: 10.2307/275792

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The Figurines of Cahokia

Welcome Plaque, Spiro Mounds

Among the rarest and most fascinating artifacts associated with Mississippian sites are figurines made of carved stone. These are most numerous in the Cahokia area, although they have also been found in various other parts of the Mississippian world, most notably at the Spiro site in Oklahoma. Regardless of where they are found, however, many of these figurines show striking similarities in raw material and iconography, and they have accordingly been the subject of considerable study.

Most of the known examples of these figurines were excavated a long time ago under conditions that are poorly documented. This is most notoriously the case at Spiro (on which more later), but it is also true of many of the Cahokia-area specimens. A reevaluation of all these early finds was spurred largely by the discovery of new examples through carefully controlled excavations as part of the FAI-270 highway salvage excavations in the 1970s by the University of Illinois. Probably the most famous of these new finds was the Birger Figurine, found at the BBB Motor site northeast of Cahokia in 1979. The context of this and other figurines discovered during this project indicated that they dated to the Stirling Phase (AD 1050 to 1150). During this period the BBB Motor site appears to have functioned as a rural ceremonial center devoted primarily to the processing of human remains for burial, so the presence of figurines there at this time may have some relevance for interpreting their function.

A few years after the discovery of the Birger Figurine Guy Prentice published an article analyzing its iconography in relation to the mythology of various Native groups of the Eastern Woodlands. The figurine depicts a woman using a hoe on the body of a snake that encircles her, the tail of which bifurcates into two vines bearing what appear to be gourds or squashes. As Prentice notes, this seems to pretty clearly symbolize agricultural fertility, and the woman may therefore represent some sort of “Earth-Mother” figure. Various Native groups in the East did in fact worship such a goddess, and the more specific attributes of these deities shed further light on the symbolism of the figurine. They typically had strong associations with serpents, hence the snake, as well as agriculture and fertility more generally. Additionally, and not at all obvious from the figurine itself, they tend to have associations with the moon and with death (with which snakes are also associated). There is typically a sort of “circle of life” motif tying together the Earth-Mother, fertility, agriculture, death, and rebirth. Prentice makes a convincing case that the Birger Figurine fits well into this motif.

One of the issues Prentice has to deal with in his article, however, is which groups are most relevant for interpreting these figurines. Recall that they are found both in the Cahokia area and at Spiro. It was long assumed that they were manufactured at or near Spiro, since they are made of a type of stone that resembles a bauxite known to occur in Arkansas. However, as Prentice points out, similar types of stone are found in various other areas, including the Ozark Highlands of southeast Missouri, near St. Louis (and therefore quite close to Cahokia). He deals with this issue by analyzing myths from throughout the Eastern Woodlands along with those of the Caddoan tribes of the Spiro area.

Plaque at Brown Mound Showing Figurine, Spiro Mounds

A research program led by Thomas Emerson of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey has sought to address this issue more directly, by chemically sourcing the figurines to determine where they were made. They began by analyzing figurines from the Cahokia area, including the Birger Figurine, and determined that they were in fact made of flint clay from the Ozarks and not from Arkansas bauxite. They followed this up by analyzing figurines from other areas to the south and southeast of Cahokia, including Spiro. This involved developing a new, non-destructive method for analyzing figurines, as these specimens were mostly museum pieces that were not available for any sort of destructive testing. The results of this study indicated that all of these examples also came from the Missouri Ozarks. Basically, all of the tested figurines appear to have come from the same source area (possibly even the same quarry), which was in the Cahokia area, and it is most plausible to think that most or all of them were also sculpted in or around Cahokia regardless of where they ended up.

There are several implications of this finding. For one, there is a striking difference in subject matter between the figurines found in the Cahokia area and those found in areas to the south, especially at Spiro. The former largely depict female figures and themes related to agriculture and fertility, while the latter more often depict male figures and themes related to warfare, violence, and the chunkey game. It was once thought that this might reflect a difference between Cahokian and Caddoan worldviews, but since all the figurines now seem to be Cahokian in origin it seems more likely that all of these themes were important in Cahokia but that only the more masculine, warlike figures ended up traveling to the southern centers, which may indicate something about the nature of Caddoan societies in the relevant period.

Another issue is just when that relevant period was. As noted above, the recent finds of figurines at the BBB Motor site and others in the Cahokia area indicate a time frame of AD 1050 to 1150 for most examples, and it is very unlikely that any were being made in the American Bottom after around 1200. This is around the time Cahokia starts to decline in influence, though it wasn’t totally abandoned until a while later, and it seems likely that some major changes made figurine-making a much less important activity than before. Outside of the Cahokia area, however, figurines don’t start to appear until even later, after around 1250, and mostly in burial contexts. This suggests to Emerson and his colleagues that it was only after the decline of Cahokian power that figurines began to be exported in significant numbers to the Caddoan and other southern centers, which were increasing in power and influence at that time.

Craig Mound, Spiro Mounds

When the Caddoans and other rising stars in the Southeast began to acquire Cahokian figurines, it appears that they strongly preferred the masculine warrior styles rather than the feminine Earth-Mother ones, although it is also quite possible that the Cahokians themselves refused to part with the latter, which tended to be ritually broken and buried at religious sites like BBB Motor. In any case, it was mostly the warrior figures that ended up moving south, and once they arrived (probably), many were drilled to be used as pipes rather than as static figures. The Cahokians seem to have made some figurine pipes, with the pipe mouthpiece and bowl incorporated into the design, but these Caddoan examples were clearly made secondarily out of non-pipe figurines, since the drill-holes interfere with the original design. This change is significant; as Emerson and colleagues put it in their 2003 paper:

This was a critical transition (i.e., from figurine to pipe) from an object of elite or religious sacra that was “observed” and to which obeisance was due to an instrument with which an individual “interacted.” There is a vast difference between bowing to an ancestral being and smoking one. For this transition to have occurred it seems reasonable to assume that either fundamental changes occurred in local religious or social practices or that the figurine had moved into a different cultural context where its original meaning was not comprehended or was irrelevant. We have no evidence for this type of transformation of a figurine into a pipe in the American Bottom. Conversely, at present, we have no large undrilled figurines in areas outside of Cahokia. The production of large flint clay icons or idols was a uniquely Cahokian phenomenon. The conversion of such figurines to pipes seems to have been a uniquely Caddoan practice.

The discovery that these figurines were apparently all manufactured in the Cahokia area in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a very important piece of evidence for untangling the importance of Cahokia for the development of Mississippian iconography and other cultural features. Interpreting that evidence is of course difficult, but this research shows the importance of archaeometric techniques for providing a baseline from which rich cultural interpretations can proceed.

Emerson, T., & Hughes, R. (2000). Figurines, Flint Clay Sourcing, the Ozark Highlands, and Cahokian Acquisition American Antiquity, 65 (1) DOI: 10.2307/2694809

Emerson, T., Hughes, R., Hynes, M., & Wisseman, S. (2003). The Sourcing and Interpretation of Cahokia-Style Figurines in the Trans-Mississippi South and Southeast American Antiquity, 68 (2) DOI: 10.2307/3557081

Prentice, G. (1986). An Analysis of the Symbolism Expressed by the Birger Figurine American Antiquity, 51 (2) DOI: 10.2307/279939

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Filed Teeth at Cahokia

Plaque atop Monks Mound Showing the Locations of Mounds to the East, Cahokia

One of the distinctive characteristics of Cahokia and its area of strong influence is the prevalence of filed teeth in many human burials. Filing of teeth as a cultural practice was common in Mexico for thousands of years before the Spanish conquest, but further north it is very rare and found mostly at Cahokia and sites in the immediately surrounding area. Gregory Perino published an article in 1967 summarizing the data as of that date on filed teeth at Cahokian sites. He notes that most of the burials with this characteristic were excavated non-professionally and that many of the early excavations were not reported in sufficient detail to know whether tooth-filing was present in the burials they uncovered. Nevertheless, Perino’s article is a useful summary of the evidence at the time.

Interestingly, Perino notes that while most of the reports of filed teeth in North America are from the Cahokia area, there are some scattered early mentions in other regions, including Georgia and the Southwest (!). The Southwestern mention is interesting, as Christy Turner has claimed that some of the remains at Chaco Canyon show filed teeth. None of the other physical anthropologists who have analyzed the relevant remains have noted the same, but that’s not very many people and in general the published physical analyses of the Chaco burials are woefully inadequate. Perino’s reference to a Southwestern example of filed teeth is unclear, but he appears to be citing a previous study of the practice in Illinois which I have not been able to track down.

Setting the comparative question aside, Perino finds three types of tooth filing at Cahokia:

1. V-shaped notches in the cutting edge of the upper medial and (more rarely) lateral incisors. The number of notches varies from 1 to 4 in the medial incisors and 1 to 2 in the lateral incisors. One example has a single notch in each of the lower medial incisors; this is the only example of filing of any of the lower teeth.
2. Shallow horizontal grooves along the upper medial incisors above the cutting edge. There can be either one or two grooves, and the grooves can be either parallel to the cutting edge or slightly oblique.
3. A combination of both of the above types on the same teeth.

Of these, the first category is the most common. The number of notches varies, and they are found more often in the teeth of younger than older individuals, although Perino notes that this is probably because the relevant parts of the teeth have worn away in older individuals. The second and third category are less common, though still somewhat widespread.

Remains of Mounds East of Monks Mound, Cahokia

Perino finds examples of tooth filing both at the Cahokia site itself, particularly in the area of Mounds 19 and 20 east of Monks Mound, and at various locations showing Cahokian influence both to the north in the lower Illinois River valley and to the south in the southern American Bottom. All of the sites he discusses are in the modern state of Illinois. Tooth filing is generally found in only a few individuals in any given burial population, indicating that while it was fairly widespread around Cahokia it was far from universal and generally limited to a small number of people within the society, possibly an elite class. Most of the examples are from men, but there are a few women as well. The chronology of Cahokia was not very well developed at the time, but it appears that the examples of filed teeth mostly date to the height of Cahokia’s power and influence, now dated to approximately AD 1050 to 1200.

Near the end of the paper Perino proposes some suggestions for other areas where similar practices might be identified through further research:

It would not be unreasonable to expect filed teeth to occur in the Tennessee-Cumberland area, in southeast Missouri, and in earlier parts of the Caddoan area, especially at Spiro. Relationships in these areas are noted through trade objects and a  similarity in their religious practices.

These are certainly among the areas showing extensive contact with the American Bottom during the Mississippian period, but they are not the only such areas. What additionally distinguishes them is that they all lie south of Cahokia, and it seems likely that what Perino has in mind here (although he doesn’t say so explicitly) is that these areas may have served as conduits for the transmittal of tooth-filing from Mexico to Cahokia. Be that as it may, as far as I know this practice has not in fact been identified in any of these other areas, which would cast doubt on the idea that it diffused from Mexico to Cahokia, unless Cahokian elites actually went directly there themselves and brought back this (and other?) ideas.

The question of the extent of Mesoamerican influence on Mississippian culture has been hotly debated over the years; the current trend seems to be to downplay the possibility of direct connections and focus on in situ explanations of the Mississippian Emergence. I’m not sure what to think about this, myself. There are a lot of things about Mississippian societies that certainly look very Mesoamerican, at least at first glance, but it’s not clear how many of these are specifically Mesoamerican developments rather than things that typically happen at a certain level of sociopolitical complexity cross-culturally and that are therefore likely to have emerged in the Mississippian context from underlying trends the same way they did in Mexico much earlier. Tooth-filing seems a lot more specific than that sort of thing, though, and I can see it as a strong piece of evidence for direct influence, but the lack of it in the intervening area (if that does in fact turn out to be the case) would be problematic for that interpretation. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it’s not totally unique to Mexico in a global context, so it’s certainly possible that the Cahokians came up with it on their own as well.

Perino, G. (1967). Additional Discoveries of Filed Teeth in the Cahokia Area American Antiquity, 32 (4) DOI: 10.2307/2694083

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Coring Monks Mound

View of Monks Mound from the East, Cahokia

Monks Mound is both the largest mound at Cahokia and the largest at any Mississippian site, by a huge margin. It’s 100 feet high and about 1,000 by 800 feet at the base, covering more than 18 acres. Its mass is five times that of the second-largest Mississippian mound (Mound A at the Etowah site in Georgia). The thing is just gigantic, and it has long been of intense interest to archaeologists. Back in the nineteenth century there was considerable debate over whether it was an artificial mound at all rather than some sort of unusual natural formation, and even into the early twentieth century there was some discussion of whether it might have been a natural rise of some sort that was built up artificially. Those debates had largely been settled by the 1960s, with increasing evidence that it was in fact an artificial construction like the smaller mounds surrounding and forming the core of the Cahokia site around the Grand Plaza. There still remained a dearth of detailed information on the composition of the mound, however, and after some excavation of various small parts of the mound in the early 1960s the archaeologists working at Cahokia came up with the idea of doing some core drilling to get a more general sense of its composition. They reported their results in a paper published in 1968.

After reviewing the techniques available to them, the researchers decided to go with the heaviest equipment they could find, a truck-mounted rig used to take soil samples for highway and building construction. This rig worked by ramming a three-inch diameter tube down at two-foot increments, after each of which the core sample would be extracted and a new tube attached to take the next two-foot sample. This worked pretty well, although some of the tubes broke loose, broke, or were otherwise lost in the course of drilling. The clay soils of the American Bottom are notoriously tough on equipment, so it’s probably a good thing they chose the most heavy-duty rig they could. They found that the core samples were somewhat compacted from the pressure of the drilling, but this didn’t end up being a major problem for interpreting them.

View of Monks Mound from the South, Cahokia

To check on the accuracy of interpretations derived from the core sampling, a small area adjacent to one of the sampling holes was excavated to get a better look at the stratigraphy. This digging generally confirmed the interpretation of the cores, especially the interpretation of thin bands of limonite, which often forms on exposed surfaces in this area, as indicating discrete construction stages of the mound. The coring and excavation also resulted in the submission of a few pieces of wood for radiocarbon dating to give a sense for the absolute chronology of mound construction. Since this was early in the history of radiocarbon dating, the standard deviations on the resulting dates are so large as to make the results of limited usefulness in delimiting substages within the Mississippian period, but they do show the general period when the mound was most likely under construction to be between AD 800 and 1300, which matches the dating of the Emergent Mississippian and Mississippian periods at Cahokia.

Probably the most important result of this research was the discovery that two of the major construction stages, including the earliest, consisted of massive deposits of black clay which likely came from topsoil deposits in various areas around the mound. The later paper I discussed earlier suggested that some of this clay may have come from the upper layers of the area to the south that would later be filled in to become the Grand Plaza, while the authors of the original paper suggested that some of it may have come from the area to the north along Cahokia Creek. It probably took a hell of a lot of clay to build these layers, so both could easily be right.

Closeup of Monks Mound Sign, Cahokia

Another interesting proposal from the authors of the coring paper is that the other mounds at Cahokia may have postdated Monks Mound. This is based on the fact that the handful of radiocarbon dates from excavations beneath other mounds that had been obtained as of that time were uniformly later (though not necessarily very much so) than the dates obtained from the coring and excavation at Monks Mound. This idea is supported by the fact that some of the other mounds are clearly aligned with Monks Mound. There has been a lot of excavation and reanalysis of older materials since the 1960s, of course, so I’m not sure if this pattern still holds up.

Monks Mound is both so huge and so important that this sort of broad-scale coring, like the conductivity survey done later in the Grand Plaza, is a reasonable way to quickly get a general sense of patterns that would take much longer to uncover via excavation, which might not even be possible to do on account of preservation concerns. This is therefore a pretty important paper. Even though it doesn’t reveal a whole lot of detail about the construction stages of Monks Mound, it’s unlikely that we’ll get much more detail than this without a seriously huge effort.

Reed, N., Bennett, J., & Porter, J. (1968). Solid Core Drilling of Monks Mound: Technique and Findings American Antiquity, 33 (2) DOI: 10.2307/278515

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Cahokia’s Grand Plaza

 

Sign Explaining the Grand Plaza at Cahokia

Mississippian societies are known for their mounds, but there’s more to them than that even if you just look at community layout at the largest centers. One of the most distinctive characteristics of Mississippian mound centers is that the mounds at the biggest centers are typically grouped very formally around a central plaza. Historic records of the Mississippian societies in the Southeast that survived into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries give some sense of the uses of these plazas, which as you might expect seem to have centered on communal ritual, feasting, games, and other events that brought people together and solidified the authority of the elites who lived on the mounds and governed the commoners. Archaeologists have been slow to give plazas the same level of attention they’ve given mounds for a long time, however. There’s long been a tendency to view them as simply empty spaces devoid of interest compared to the impressive mounds that surround them.

That has started to change over the past twenty years or so, however. One of the early efforts in this direction was a field school at the biggest and most spectacular Mississippian site, Cahokia, in 1989. The results of this research were reported in an article published in 1993, and they reveal that there’s more to Cahokia’s Grand Plaza than meets the eye.

Grand Plaza from Monk's Mound, Cahokia

The American Bottom, where Cahokia is located, is characterized by a relatively flat but gently rolling terrain resulting from many years of the Mississippi River winding its way across the floodplain, creating a wide variety of sand ridges interspersed with lower swales filled with alluvial silt and clay. Given this context, the flatness of the Grand Plaza calls out for some sort of explanation. One possibility is that this is an area where natural deposition of sediment happens to have filled in the swales and covered over the ridges, creating a particularly flat area that the Cahokians took advantage of as a natural plaza site by building mounds around it. Other parts of the Cahokia site that have been excavated appear to have been built on similar natural flats. The other option is that the Cahokians themselves took an area that was dominated by the usual ridge and swale topography and flattened it out by cutting down the ridges and filling in the swales to create an artificially flat plaza. If this were the case it would obviously have important implications for the amount of labor that went into the building of Cahokia, which in turn would be an important factor in understanding the nature of the site and of its influence in other areas.

To investigate this question the researchers started with an electromagnetic conductivity survey of the western portion of the Grand Plaza. Since sand tends to have a lower conductivity than silts and clays, sand ridges should show up in a survey like this as areas of lower conductivity compared to swales. This sort of survey should also pick up underground borrow pits (where material was dug for use in mounds and other construction) that were later filled in, provided the later fill was different in conductivity from the surrounding soil. The survey was followed by core sampling to confirm the results, then by limited excavation of a few blocks in the plaza to get a closer look at the stratigraphy of areas that came up with interesting survey results.

The Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, Cahokia

The conductivity survey found that there was indeed a subterranean sand ridge under part of the plaza, with apparent swales on either side of it. Some apparent borrow pits also showed up. The coring confirmed these results, and five excavation blocks were dug: two on the ridge, two in an adjacent swale, and one in a possible borrow pit.

The excavation results showed pretty clearly that the final flat condition of the plaza was indeed the result of human action rather than natural deposition. There was a very sharp delineation between the underlying natural deposits of both the ridge and the swale and the overlying fill, which contained varying amounts of artifacts and did not look anything like natural alluviation. This was also the case for the borrow pit, where the fill was indeed quite different from the surrounding material and clearly secondary.

From the artifacts found in the fill, it appears that the leveling of the plaza occurred around the time of the transition from the Emergent Mississippian to the Mississippian period, which current dating places around AD 1050. Interestingly, it appears that the leveling was actually a secondary activity after the area had been pretty thoroughly dug over for fill, perhaps to build the early mounds at the site. This means that this may in fact have originally been a naturally flat area (although there’s really no way to be sure) but that the upper layers of soil were stripped away for mound construction early on, only to have the resulting pits and scars covered up later by fill that created the final plaza surface. The authors propose a tentative scenario in which early mound construction during the Emergent Mississippian period took fill from this area, which was at the time away from the main area of occupation along Cahokia Creek to the north, and it was only later, when Cahokia began to really hit its stride, that plans changed and this area was refilled to become the Grand Plaza. Whether this was the case or not, it’s very clear from this study that the history of the Grand Plaza is a lot more complicated than it looks at first site.

Holley, G., Dalan, R., & Smith, P. (1993). Investigations in the Cahokia Site Grand Plaza American Antiquity, 58 (2) DOI: 10.2307/281972

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Mississippian Agriculture

Garden at Chucalissa Mounds, Memphis, Tennessee

One of the main ways Mississippian societies differed from earlier societies in eastern North America was in their much heavier reliance on maize agriculture for subsistence. There had been agriculture, and even maize, before in the east, but the Mississippians farmed much more intensively and used maize in particular much more heavily than people had before. The high productivity of maize agriculture presumably led to the increased population and more elaborate societies characteristic of the Mississippians, and also would have provided a dependable basis for the incipient urbanism seen in the biggest Mississippian centers like Cahokia. While maize had been introduced (ultimately from Mesoamerica and probably via the Southwest, although the details remain murky) to parts of the Eastern Woodlands hundreds of years before the rise of Mississippian societies after AD 900, it was only with the so-called “Mississippian Emergence” that it became a staple crop. The amount of maize typically found at archaeological sites in the east skyrockets after the Emergence, and intensive use of this crop seems to be a fundamental characteristic of the Mississippian lifeway.

Most of this has been known for a long time, based on the amount of maize found in Mississippian sites, but actually identifying and studying the fields where maize and other crops were grown had to wait until the incorporation of aerial photography into Midwestern archaeology in the 1960s. An important early contribution to knowledge of these issues is a paper published by Melvin Fowler in 1969. Fowler reports on work done by Southern Illinois University over the preceding few years at Mississippian sites in that incorporated aerial photography. He focuses on two sites specifically: the Lunsford-Pulcher site, a secondary mound center about 7 miles south of Cahokia, and the Texas site, a smaller farmstead on the Kaskaskia River about 50 miles east of Cahokia.

In both cases, aerial photography indicated the presence of parallel ridges that were not obvious on the ground in the proximity of the main architectural components of the sites. Surface collection of artifacts indicated a particular association between these ridges and fragments of the flaked-stone hoes that are very common at Mississippian sites, strengthening the hypothesis that the ridges indicated fields. Excavation further confirmed the hypothesis, revealing that the ridges consisted of dark topsoil piled up and revealing the lighter subsoil between the ridges. The narrowness of the ridges further indicated that they were definitely prehistoric and not the result of historic plowing. Fowler also refers to evidence from excavations in the 1930s at Ocmulgee National Monument, a major Mississippian center in Georgia, that revealed very similar ridges beneath at least one mound. This indicates that rather than an idiosyncratic practice in southern Illinois these ridges were a widespread Mississippian trait, apparently connected to hoe agriculture. He also refers to historical accounts from the nineteenth century indicating that similar ridged fields covered vast areas of Wisconsin and Michigan before white settlement.

Gardening Sign, Chucalissa Mounds, Memphis, Tennessee

The exact reason for the ridges was unclear to Fowler, and he offered just a few tentative ideas. It could have been a development stemming from the adoption of hoes, which would have been more effective than the digging sticks used previously and may have made it easier to pile up good soil for planting. The linear ridges of Mississippian agriculture may have been more efficient than the small hills used previously and associated with the use of the digging stick rather than the hoe. They may also have contributed to a more effective distribution of water to the plants; irrigation would not have been necessary in this wet climate, but a more efficient use of the copious rainfall may have been beneficial. It is also possible that the ridging allowed the use of low-lying land along rivers that would otherwise have been too swampy for planting. The two Illinois sites are certainly in locations where this would likely have been a factor, although Fowler notes that this is not the case for all the other reported areas with ridged fields.

Overall, this is an interesting study pointing out the advantages of aerial photography for identifying subtle archaeological features that may not be apparent on the ground. I am reminded especially of the Chaco road system, which was similarly identified via aerial photography a few years later. Also, and this has nothing to do with this particular article, I was interested to see the following notice in a box at the end of the last page:

NOTICE TO AUTHORS

A formal review procedure for all papers submitted to American Antiquity is being initiated. Papers will be evaluated by two referees; authors will receive copies of referee comments (unidentified as to source). Beginning immediately, THREE COPIES of all articles and submissions to Facts and Comments must be submitted. Contributions will not be considered for publication unless submitted in triplicate. Address inquiries to the editor-elect, EDWIN N. WILMSEN, Museum of Anthropology, Universitv of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48104.

Peer review was slow to catch on in archaeology, it seems.

Fowler, M. (1969). Middle Mississippian Agricultural Fields American Antiquity, 34 (4) DOI: 10.2307/277733

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Who the Cahokians Weren’t

Illinois Welcome Sign

The name “Cahokia” comes from one of the constituent tribes of the Illinois Confederacy, a group of several semi-autonomous “tribes” or “villages” that occupied much of what is now the state of Illinois and parts of some of the surrounding states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Staunch allies of the French throughout most of the colonial period, the Illinois were among the hardest-hit by the various forces buffeting Native American groups in the wake of European contact, and they ended up suffering one of the most dramatic demographic collapses of the tribes we have substantial information on. Emily Blasingham, who did a detailed ethnohistoric study of Illinois population decline in the 1950s, concluded that the total population of the Confederacy at the time of French contact in the 1670s was around 10,000, which by 1800 had dwindled all the way to a mere 500 people. The descendants of the remaining Illinois ended up in northeastern Oklahoma, where they are now known as the Peoria (originally the name of one of the constituent tribes of the Confederacy along with the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and others).

Most of the member tribes of the Confederacy, including the Cahokia and Peoria, spoke dialects of the Miami-Illinois language, part of the widespread Algonquian language family. One possible exception is the poorly known Michigamea, who joined the Confederacy in the early eighteenth century and had apparently lived before that somewhere further down the Mississippi River. While it has generally been assumed that the Michigamea also spoke Miami-Illinois, there is some evidence that they may actually have spoken a different language, possibly belonging to the Siouan family, before they joined the Confederacy. Be that as it may, the Illinois Confederacy as a whole was clearly primarily a group of tribes who lived near each other in the seventeenth century and spoke the same language.

Cahokia Courthouse, Cahokia, Illinois

The various Illinois groups moved around quite a lot during the colonial period in response to various threats and opportunities, but they had two main focuses of settlement: the upper Illinois River valley, especially around Starved Rock and Peoria Lake, and the American Bottom, along the Mississippi River between the mouths of the Illinois and Kaskaskia Rivers. The Cahokias consistently lived in the American Bottom for most of their recorded history, and gave their name to both the French settlement of Cahokia, which still exists as the town of Cahokia, Illinois, with its famous courthouse, and the nearby Cahokia Mounds.

The question of who built the Cahokia Mounds, and even if they were artificial at all, was hotly debated in the early history of American archaeology. Even after the early period of wild speculation in the nineteenth century had given way to a more systematic, realistic approach in the early twentieth, the answer remained unclear. In 1944 Donald Wray and Hale Smith, two archaeologists from the University of Chicago, proposed an answer with at least a surface degree of elegance and plausibility, namely, that Cahokia and other Mississippian sites in the region were the work of the Illinois Confederacy.

Southwest Corner of Monks Mound, Cahokia Mounds, Collinsville, Illinois

Wray and Smith had two main lines of evidence for this proposal: distributional and chronological. They noted, first, that the remains of what was then called the “Middle Mississippi Culture” corresponded pretty closely to the areas known to have been occupied by the Illinois in colonial times. Recall that the main areas of Illinois settlement were in the American Bottom and along the upper Illinois River, both areas that do indeed have substantial Mississippian remains. They also note that the general uniformity of Mississippian material culture suggests substantial social and political ties among the groups living in various parts of the region, such as would have been the case with a Confederacy such as that of the Illinois. Note that they don’t point to any specific material culture similarities between Mississippian sites and known Illinois sites, presumably because none of the latter were known at the time.

Their chronological argument takes a somewhat different tack. They note that other archaeologists had recently proposed that Mississippian societies dated to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, based on the lack of mention of some of the major mound sites by the early European explorers. Since the only occupants of the Mississippian parts of Illinois during this period are known to have been the Illinois groups, it follows that they must have been the Mississippians. They also go into some detail about certain sites showing contact between the Mississippians and the Oneota culture found primarily further north and tentatively identified with the speakers of Chiwere Siouan languages (i.e., Ioway, Oto, and Missouria). Since many Oneota sites have European trade goods and therefore clearly date to the contact period, Wray and Smith conclude that sites such as some in northern Illinois showing both Oneota and Mississippian traits support their chronological reconstruction. They also note the contacts between the American Bottom Mississippian sites and the southeast Missouri/northeast Arkansas area occupied historically by the Siouan-speaking Quapaw and connect this on somewhat shaky grounds to the Oneota as well.

Interpretive Sign at Southwest Corner of Monks Mound, Cahokia Mounds

We now know that this is all wrong, of course. Wray and Smith were working at a time when there was no way to get absolute dates for archaeological sites in the Midwest, and their chronological assumptions turned out to be totally unfounded when radiocarbon dating was invented a few years later and it turned out that the Mississippian sites were much older than the Illinois Confederacy and that in between there was a period when the American Bottom was part of the “Vacant Quarter” abandoned by the Mississippians. While it’s not impossible that some of the ancestors of the people who would later become the Illinois were involved in some Mississippian societies, there is no particular reason to connect them to the American Bottom specifically, and there is certainly lots of evidence indicating that the Illinois Confederacy itself came many centuries after the Mississippian phenomenon and had no direct connection to it.

While it’s easy to criticize ideas like this in hindsight, with the benefit of more and better information accumulated over several decades, it’s important to note that Wray and Smith’s ideas were actually challenged quite vigorously at the time by Waldo Wedel of the Smithsonian, who published a comment the following year aggressively pointing out the weakness of their assumptions and the dubiousness of their conclusions. Wedel points out that there are no known European trade goods associated with Mississippian sites in Illinois and that there is no evidence at all linking the Mississippian sites to the Illinois Confederacy despite their similar geographical distributions. He also challenges the idea that Mississippian societies in general are post-contact, and points out that while it was a possible interpretation of the evidence available at the time it was definitely not the only one and was lacking in actual supporting evidence. Further, he points out that while some Oneota sites are definitely post-contact, not all of the known sites had produced European trade goods, and it was not at all clear that all Oneota sites were historic rather than prehistoric. Also, he notes that the Quapaw stuff doesn’t make any sense and seems to be predicated on the assumption that since the Quapaw spoke a Siouan language and Oneota was thought to represent Siouan speakers the Quapaw could somehow be associated with Oneota despite the lack of any known Oneota sites in the Quapaw area. Wedel takes great pains to note that he is not criticizing the very idea of synthesizing archaeological data and organizing it into big historical narratives, as Wray and Smith have tried to do, just pointing out the flaws in the way they and some other archaeologists go about doing this. (This part is interesting because Wedel himself would go on to become one of the most important synthesizers of the archaeology of the Great Plains.)

Welcome Sign, Kaskaskia, Illinois

As it turns out, Wedel was more or less completely right on every point he criticized Wray and Smith about, and the much more complete and accurate picture we now have of Midwestern archaeology has vindicated him. The point is not that Wray and Smith were wrong so much as that they were sloppy; it’s always going to be the case that even many very reasonable interpretations based on the best data available at one time will turn out to be wrong when better data appears, but not all interpretations at any given point in time are necessarily based on the best data or the most reasonable assumptions. This little dispute provides a particularly clear example of this general point.

Blasingham, E. (1956). The Depopulation of the Illinois Indians, Part I Ethnohistory, 3 (3) DOI: 10.2307/480408

Blasingham, E. (1956). The Depopulation of the Illinois Indians. Part 2, Concluded Ethnohistory, 3 (4) DOI: 10.2307/480464

Wedel, W. (1945). On the Illinois Confederacy and Middle Mississippi Culture in Illinois American Antiquity, 10 (4) DOI: 10.2307/275581

Wray, D., & Smith, H. (1944). An Hypothesis for the Identification of the Illinois Confederacy with the Middle Mississippi Culture in Illinois American Antiquity, 10 (1) DOI: 10.2307/275179

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