Excavating a Mississippian Outpost

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Timothy Pauketat and an experienced student crew will undertake in the summer of 2002 the excavation of a recently discovered "outpost" of pre-Columbian Cahokia, located in the central Mississippi River valley. Several previous seasons of fieldwork at this and five other nearby "Mississippian" villages by Pauketat and crew all now point to this one site for an answer to a critical research question: Did Cahokians, having constructed the premier religious and political center in North America 950 years ago (@ AD 1050), physically control the farming economy of the region's rural hinterlands? To date, excavations at other sites have provided suggestive but not definitive evidence of such control. These other sites have, however, shown that farmers with diverse cultural backgrounds moved into a rich agricultural zone coincident with Cahokia's emergence as a regional center. Discoveries from two previous seasons of work at the Grossmann site include densely packed non-domestic buildings, exotic artifacts, and a hoard of 70 ax-heads, all within a suspected four-sided village. Such finds make it unique to the farming villages of the region. These finds also make it plausible that (1) this one village was actually a planned outpost established in the midst of farmers by a group of Cahokians or closely related kin or administrative functionaries, and (2) that the establishment of the other farming villages in the vicinity was part of an overall planned transformation of the cultural and physical landscape. The physical attributes of stone ax-heads from the site suggest that clearing the woodlands may have been a significant part of the means whereby Cahokians instituted an agricultural system and obtained the cooperation of farmers. The 2002 excavations will reveal the spatial plan of the Grossmann site by mechanically removing the disturbed plowzone in a 2500-square-meter area, an excavation strategy also necessitated by the imminent destruction of the site by urban sprawl. The site will be totally excavated recovering data of a sort seldom retrieved by archaeologists. Excavation will either verify the planned, high-status hypothesis or prove the site to be lacking a central plan. In either case, the relationships between Cahokia and the hinterland farmers will be apparent in the debris left behind from the day-to-day practices of the residents. In this debris, the team will recover the ultimate answers for a central question of concern to all that study complex societies: How were such societies and their agricultural systems instituted? This question is in turn important to the social sciences and to a broadened understanding global politics because it is a basis for an improved general understanding of the extent to which cultural traditions and actions of ordinary people play a part in larger-scale political changes.