Land of Water, City of the Dead: Religion and Cahokia's Emergence
224
Land of Water, City of the Dead: Religion and Cahokia's Emergence
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Overview
Cahokia, the largest city of the Mississippian mound cultures, lies outside present-day East St. Louis. Land of Water, City of the Dead reconceptualizes Cahokia’s emergence and expansion (ca. 1050–1200), focusing on understanding a newly imagined religion and complexity through a non-Western lens. Sarah E. Baires argues that this system of beliefs was a dynamic, lived component, based on a broader ontology, with roots in other mound societies. This religion was realized through novel mortuary practices and burial mounds as well as through the careful planning and development of this early city’s urban landscape.
Baires analyzes the organization and alignment of the precinct of downtown Cahokia with a specific focus on the newly discovered and excavated Rattlesnake Causeway and the ridge-top mortuary mounds located along the site axes. Land of Water, City of the Dead also presents new data from the 1954 excavations of the ridge-top mortuary Wilson Mound and a complete analysis of the associated human remains. Through this skeletal analysis, Baires discusses the ways that Cahokians processed and buried their ancestors, identifying unique mortuary practices that include the intentional dismemberment of human bodies and burial with marine shell beads and other materials.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391249 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2017 |
| Series: | Archaeology of the American South: New Directions and Perspectives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Living Landscapes
Cahokia's Natural and Urban Environments
Like urban subjects, cities are processes and products.
— John W. Janusek, 2015
"Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts."
— Vanessa Watts, 2013
The land can be a malleable and relational foundation of religious belief and practice for many non-Western persons (Deloria 2003; see also Echo-Hawk 2009). Landscapes, both built and natural, have the potential to be active, informing how and why people choose to construct their cities, towns, and communities in particular areas (see Tilley 1997; Zedeño 2009). Archaeologists often argue that the reasons for the rise of complex societies and sedentism stem from the warming climate (ca. 11,500 cal yr. BP) and the development of agriculture that, when combined, created the "right" environment for the emergence of the state (Anderson et al. 2007; see also Yoffee 2005). Such theories tend to present a cause-and-effect view of the past whereby humans and places are described as non-agentic players in an evolutionary system of sociopolitical development. In this chapter, I explore a different perspective, one where places of early civilization held histories and stories that may include ties to creation myths, memories, as well as the agency of people and places (see Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; see also Watts 2013).
The landscape can become a "prominent" feature, with "vital natural elements" and recurring celestial cycles that have the potential to shape histories and impact experiences (Janusek 2006: 470). The Osage (according to La Flesche [1932:31]) considered the landscape to house the all-pervasive power, Wa-kon-da; this power "resides in the air, the blue sky, the clouds, the stars, the sun, the moon and the earth [as well as] all living and moving things" (La Flesche 1932:31). Wa-kon-da is at once one God, but also prescenced in everything, and the Osage consider their cosmos as consisting of relationships among the sky, the living world, and the earth. I cite the Osage (a Dhegihas Siouan tribe) in particular because its territory (during European conquest and colonialism, 1690) was located nearest to Cahokia, in contemporary southwestern Missouri near the Osage River (La Flesche 1932:28). Although the location of the Osage alone does not mean they were descendants of Cahokians, it does provide a context within which to explore such Indigenous understandings of the physical and cosmological world as it might have been experienced at Cahokia. From this perspective and through a consideration of both the natural and built landscapes of Cahokia City, I explore the relationality of the land, as it was the foundation of Indigenous religious experience.
Today, when walking through the remains of the Cahokia Precinct, I am often struck by the "sunken-in" quality of the natural landscape. It feels low and swampy, often with shallow pools of standing water collected in small crevices or depressions in the land. Depending on the season and time of day, steam and/or fog can be seen hovering low to the ground. Deer are often visible grazing near the tree lines or out in open spaces, and water birds can be seen floating and standing in water-filled borrow pits. While walking through Cahokia, I see tall prairie grasses, poison ivy, and other plants covering the open spaces not regularly mowed by state park officials. But, trails are cut through these spaces, creating pathways that take you to rarely visited parts of the site. One can imagine these areas covered in small semisubterranean houses, plazas, public and special-use buildings as well as causeways and pathways maintained by Cahokia's inhabitants. The flat, ridge, and swale floodplain is a place of history with occupations from the Terminal Late Woodland period (ca. AD 900–1050) to the present. Now, this once-burgeoning city is bisected by a state highway, pay-by-the-hour motels, and the local horse racetrack constructed upon or nearby Cahokian neighborhoods, plazas, and mounds. Yet it is still possible to retrace these medieval neighborhoods situated within the surrounding modern and floodplain environment. In this place, temporalities become layered where the past and the present are co-occupants of this vibrant natural environment. While walking through Cahokia, one can see how this space was transformed into a new city that simultaneously cites the powers of Wa-kon-da, the cosmos, and the earthly realm.
Although expansive views are blocked today by modern neighborhoods, strip malls, railroads, and dumpsites, you are aware that the Mississippi River is located to the east and that St. Louis is not far away. In fact, if one climbs to the top of Monks Mound, St. Louis becomes visible in the hazy distance, just beyond the city landfill, as a line of buildings and highways marking the location of another formidable Mississippian period site, the St. Louis Mound Group. The Mississippian site of East St. Louis is also noticeable from this vantage point, and together these three precincts (Cahokia, East St. Louis, and St. Louis) transformed the natural floodplain into a bustling metropolis that occupied the area ca. AD 1050–1400. It is this relationship between the natural and built landscapes that provided a unique context for Cahokia, the city, to emerge. The following discussion of the natural landscape foregrounds the relationality of this environment as one that consisted of secondary forces with their "own unique set of qualities or characteristics that g[i]ve ... real or potential value to humans" (La Flesche 1932:32). Such environments encompass suites of powers that can sustain (e.g., food resources) or destroy life (e.g., birds of prey). These powers are recognizable in the stands of trees, the water-filled depressions, the open flat spaces, and the animals that occupy this landscape.
Natural Landscape and Environment
The City of Cahokia convenes with the natural topography in the southwestern portion of present-day Illinois in the wide expanse of the Mississippi River floodplain situated at the confluence of the Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers (Figure 1.1). The American Bottom encompasses the area of the Mississippi River floodplain from Alton, Illinois (near the mouth of the Missouri River), southward toward the town of Chester (just below the mouth of the Kaskaskia River) (Fowler 1997). This area was named as such "because the most intensive settlement there had been by Americans after the Revolutionary War" (Fowler 1997:4). Characterized by two major physiographic zones, the American Bottom includes the floodplain and the uplands, each of which is home to distinct resources that include rich, fertile soils perfect for farming, and oak-hickory forests, prairie, streams, and creeks (Table 1.1) (Betzenhauser 2011; Fowler 1975, 1997; Milner 1998; Pauketat 2013b; Welch 1975).
The American Bottom floodplain was initially formed by "the erosional action of glacial torrents thousands of years ago" and, due to the movement of the Mississippi River over time, this area became dotted with abandoned river channels, oxbow lakes, marshes, swales, and tributary streams that regularly absorbed floodwaters (Fowler 1997:4). The resultant environment was ideal for farming and consisted of flood-deposited sands and silts, clays, marshy swales, and dryer ridges. Additionally, such alluvial clays were ideal for mound construction and pottery production. Within the floodplain itself, lithic resources were limited and consisted of chert and igneous cobbles transported by rivers and streams (Betzenhauser 2011; Pauketat 2004, 2013b). These same areas also provided a variety of large and small mammals, rodents, migratory birds, fish, mussels, and turtles as well as naturally growing harvestable plants exploited for food resources (Miracle 1998; Parker and Scott 2007) (see Table 1.1).
Important to the topic of the relationality of the natural landscape and to the construction of Cahokia is the recognition that this city was intentionally built in a swampy, wet area. Charles Dickens (1987:220–222 [1842]) described the American Bottom as consisting of "one unbroken slough of black mud and water. It had no variety but in depth." Dickens further noted the consistent presence of stagnant floodwaters undrained from the swampy areas of the land, indicating this area was typically inundated, at some level, with water. Due to the meandering course of the Mississippi, the river carved out ridges and swales, providing relatively high points of silty to sandy soils with clay soils in the low swales. Floodwaters consistently filled in low areas, creating swampy ponds that dotted the Cahokian landscape (Milner 1998).
Water is an important, if not crucial, part of the Cahokia Precinct's natural landscape. Echo-Hawk Jr. (2009) describes watery places as having the potential to be "holy places" or "powerful places," describing them as "hierophanies," following Eliade (1987). These holy and powerful places create "a wonderous land where everything has a spirit, including the earth, water, and every living thing" (Echo-Hawk Jr. 2009:68). For the Osage, water-animals were called upon to help in traversing such waterways. Water bodies like streams, rivers, and lakes occasionally considered dangerous, required permissions and aid from The Great Spirit to cross safely (La Flesche 1932:203). Watery places are also tied to the underworld and the world of the dead as boundaries that need to be passed through prior to the soul or spirit arriving in the afterlife (Lankford 2007). In addition to bodies of water, marine and fresh-water shells share a similar importance as they have been documented to provide connections between the living and the dead. Marine shell in the form of whole shells or beads, importantly, is associated with mortuary contexts and burials throughout Cahokia, potentially tying together the watery underworld with that of the living (see Chapter 6) (see also Claassen 2011). Water, in its many forms, can embody a multitude of experiences from holy places visited on vision quests (Echo-Hawk Jr. 2009) to dangerous boundaries to be traversed with accompanying guidance and permissions from the ancestors (La Flesche 1932). Further, water and watery places are historically important to Native North Americans, especially in the southeast; watery places were incorporated into human-made landscapes since the Archaic period (Sassaman 2004). It is not surprising then that water was a pervasive part of the Cahokia precinct landscape, one that was maintained year-round in water-filled borrow pits, streams, and marshy wetlands.
Swamps and lakes covered 19 percent of the floodplain in this part of the Mississippi River valley with an additional 15 percent of the entire American Bottom region consistently covered in water (Milner 1998: 45). The average annual rainfall at Cahokia is 39 inches and can vary between 69 inches and 23 inches in a single year (Welch 1975). In such a wet environment, the majority of the surface water evaporates (rather than drains) and, during the hot summer months (where temperatures can reach upwards of 103° Fahrenheit), creates a steamy and humid environment. When water levels do drop, slow, poor drainage means that low areas continue to contain muddy pools of water inundated with marshy vegetation. These areas of standing water teamed with resources that included naturally growing edible plants, waterbirds, and fish making for a fertile if steamy summer landscape (Milner 1998:44–49).
Such a landscape was ripe for farming, with the dryer parts of the floodplain and the higher sandier ridges ideal for cultivating crops; the soils drained well and were easier to till with a shell or stone hoe. Maize (Zea mays) was an important plant farmed in this area during Cahokia's domination of the valley, in addition to a few Indigenous cultigens including goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum), and maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana), which produced starchy seeds and were cultivated by early Late Woodland horticulturalists in the area as well as Cahokians (Johannessen 1984; Lopinot 1991, 1994; Parker and Scott 2007; Simon 2002, 2014; see also Smith 1989). Maize, however, was the important crop and grown in abundance. Maize cobs and kernels are found archaeologically in domestic buildings and pits (Lopinot 1994; Milner 1998), and depicted in "Earth Mother" imagery seen on flint clay figurines (Birger and Sponemann) recovered from two small sites near Cahokia (Emerson 2015; Emerson et al. 2003; see also Baltus et al. 2015).
In addition to maize and Indigenous cultigens, other edible plants gathered or cultivated from the surrounding area include nuts, bottle gourd, two species of squash, sunflower, grape, persimmon, strawberry, plum, elderberry and mulberry, and nightshade (Pauketat et al. 2002; see also Parker and Scott 2007). The variety of plant species, either farmed or gathered, emphasizes the unique fertility of the American Bottom landscape, indicating that this place was important not only for its location near such a major river but also for its bounty. This aspect of the natural environment becomes important when attempting to understand why Cahokia's inhabitants chose to construct such a large city in a low, marshy area.
This diverse natural landscape, Mother Earth, "shape[s] society and nurture[s] the human spirit." Mother Earth "also tells the sacred stories of the birds, animals, plants, and the natural phenomena that comprise human habitats" (Echo-Hawk Jr. 2009:58). Thus, the natural landscape is best understood as an active participant in the construction of Cahokian society. It is not something passively acted upon, but relationally constitutes the human, animal, and spiritual inhabitants of a community. Further, as Vanessa Watts (2013:23) states, "Human thought and action are therefore derived from a literal expression of particular places and historical events in Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe cosmologies. The agency that place possesses can be thought of in a similar way that Western thinkers locate agency in human beings ... Indigenous peoples ... are extensions of the very land we walk upon." Viewing Cahokia through such a lens reveals a connection to the rest of what is now the Southeastern and Midwestern United States by more than riverways and overland trails (Pauketat 2004, 2013a). These connections are derived from Place-Thought, a theoretical perspective that considers agency as located in the land (V. Watts 2013). At Cahokia, this is embodied in and through access to unique materials gathered from the Gulf of Mexico, the Ozarks, Wisconsin, and Lake Michigan; Cahokia's influence can be traced to sites like Spiro in Oklahoma, Etowah in Georgia, and Aztalan and Trempealeau in Wisconsin (see Brown 1971; Fowler et al. 1999; Pauketat et al. 2010). This unique American Bottom landscape became home to one of the most influential cities from the eleventh and twelfth centuries supported by extensive farming, the bounties of the St. François Mountains, and the nearby uplands to the east. Exploring the natural features and resources of this area leads us to a reconsideration of Cahokia's built landscape; the following paragraphs engage with the relationships embedded within and created through both these natural and built worlds.
Cahokia's Built Landscape
The natural features of the American Bottom and the built landscape of Cahokia create an urban-space that consists of earthen monuments, plazas, causeways, and households interdigitated with water features, prairies, and the nearby limestone bluffs. Cahokia, the city, consists of three precincts (St. Louis, East St. Louis, and Cahokia) stretching from present-day Collinsville to East St. Louis, Illinois, and across the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri (Figure 1.2). These three precincts were roughly contemporaneous (ca. AD 1050–1400) and consisted of mound and plaza site organization. Cahokia — the largest of this complex — "coalesced in short order around a political leader, a religious movement, or a kin-coalition that rapidly centralized social relations and political economy of the American Bottom" (Pauketat 2002:152; see also Pauketat 1994) (Figure 1.3). Pauketat's "Big Bang" hypothesis emerged out of a comparative study of excavation results from different Cahokian neighborhoods (Tract 15A, Dunham Tract, ICT-II, Grand Plaza, Mound 72, FAI-270) drawing upon multiple lines of evidence, looking to landscape modification, and abandonment of local Terminal Late Woodland lifeways in the face of a new Cahokian ideology. The processes of urbanization stemmed, some might argue, from both immigration and in situ transitions of local populations to new Cahokia lifeways (see Alt 2010a). Terminal Late Woodland societies (AD 900–1050) occupied, albeit sparsely, the American Bottom landscape and "were characterized by low population densities, dispersed communities, and a diverse material culture" (Slater et al. 2014:117; see also Fortier and McElrath 2002). The "Big Bang" included the seemingly overnight introduction of new lifeways and religious beliefs to these local populations as well as a dramatic increase in population due to immigration (estimated ca. 15,000 people) (Pauketat 2002; Pauketat and Lopinot 1997; Slater et al. 2014). A recent study conducted by Slater et al. (2014:123, 125; emphasis original) sampled 133 teeth from 87 individuals to identify the origins of Cahokia's population increase; their results identified that 33% of their sample "have at least one tooth with a non-local ratio," confirming the hypothesis that people were moving "into the area during and after the Big Bang ca. AD 1050." Further, their data indicate that Cahokia's early population was "derived from multiple locations within and outside the American bottom region" with some people moving to this burgeoning city as children (Slater et. al 2014:125). These combined data indicate that Cahokia's emergence was one of rapid and planned change persuasive enough to draw local and nonlocal people alike to move into this new city (see also Alt 2002; Pauketat 2002:153; Pauketat and Alt 2005).
(Continues…)
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