Power in ancient eastern North America cannot be segregated a priori into political, social, and religious dimensions. Rather, it was a commonly dispersed attribute of human/non-human social fields that might be transferred, gathered, embodied, or emplaced. Thus, political power was realized, at least in part, through socio-religious practices involving ancestors, elements, and otherworldly forces. Deconstructing the dichotomy of religion and politics, we focus on practices of material manipulation, burning, and burial at and around the eleventh- and twelfth-century complex of Cahokia along the Mississippi River. Specifically, we detail a number of contexts where temple buildings, human remains, and objects were transubstantiated, especially through burning, and hence their power transformed. Persons were constructed, places of power were built, political agents were defined, and enemies were eliminated through fire and earth.
We present the recent results of a magnetometry survey of the Spring Lake Tract conducted during the summer of 2015 at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site located along the Mississippi River Floodplain in southern Illinois. This tract, located southeast of Woodhenge and west of the Grand Plaza, is situated north of two known borrow pits and includes an additional, previously unidentified borrow pit. Through comparing our gradiometer results with our subsequent test excavations, we argue that this area of Cahokia potentially demonstrates an increase in building density at the Spring Lake Tract during the transition between the Terminal Late Woodland and Lohmann phases. In addition, our survey and exaction results demonstrate that this area was densely occupied between the Lohmann and Stirling phases. During the Moorehead phase, we identify a possible increase in habitation based on hypothesized structure density using statistical analyses of length and width ratios (m) and structure area (m2). Our preliminary results suggest that the Spring Lake Tract saw an increase in habitation during the Moorehead phase, a new perspective on the density and use of domestic space during Cahokia's late occupational history.
This article examines the role of mortuary practice in the emergence (c. ad 1050–1100) of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian Native American city north of Mexico. The parallel partitioning of human and gastropod bodies in ridge-top mortuary mounds is examined and I argue that the presence of gastropods buried alongside human bodies served to connect the living world of humans with the watery underworld of the dead. From a microhistorical perspective, this paper focuses on the processing and deposition of bodies and their subsequent interment in ridge-top burials to parse the potential relationships between such mortuary practice and Cahokia's emergence as a complex polity. The paper presents data on the association of shell materials with human bodies from six previously excavated ridge-tops for comparison with new data on shell materials and human burials from Wilson Mound, a small ridge-top located on the western edge of Cahokia. Together, these data suggest the emergence of Cahokia was embedded in newly articulated relationships with persons enacted through the process of disarticulating the dead for burial mediated with mollusc shell.
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