Mississippianization, Religious Conversion and Identity Formation in Pre-Columbian Wisconsin

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Timothy Pauketat, Robert Boszhardt, and Danielle Benden will lead a team of specialists and students in a three-year archaeological investigation of a 950-year-old cultural complex in the upper Mississippi valley near LaCrosse, Wisconsin. The team includes archaeologists, geophysical and geomorphological scientists, a zooarchaeologist, a paleoethnobotanist, and Native and non-native American graduate and undergraduate students. The project goal is to explain an episode of ancient colonization, peace-making, and religious proselytization associated with the founding American Indian city of Cahokia (in southern Illinois). Already established are these baseline facts: at or just before the year AD 1050, Cahokians or some related group of expatriots/converts established missions or colonial outposts in various northern locales. In the project area, the colonial intrusion appears to have transformed the identities, religious beliefs, and daily practices of many people, some of whom may have fallen in line with the southerners. In such ways, the mission/outpost settlements seem foundational to the establishment of a century-and-a-half "peace" in the Mississippi valley. Measures of the timing, identity, character, and consequences of this phenomenon will be generated based on investigations of three known sites and, using those measures, project personnel will infer the degree of peaceful cohabitation or religious conversion of the "Effigy Mound Culture" locals vis-à-vis the intrusive southerners. The project will determine (1) who the newcomers really were, (2) how they negotiated their way into the northlands (religion, politics, or violence?), and (3) how such relations might have been connected to the end of the Effigy Mound Culture in the north and to Cahokia's rapid rise to power in the south. Geophysical surveys (using magnetic and electrical resistivity ground-penetrating devices) will identify the remains of ancient houses, domestic facilities, religious temples, and ritual debris beneath the ground at the Fisher, Trempealeau, and 47-TR-6 sites. Targeted excavations will follow, using artifact assemblages and architectural remains to generate the measures noted above. At the regional level, the project's intellectual merits include determining the cause or consequence of the pervasive cultural changes in the eleventh century midcontinent. Long-held explanations of both the ancient city of Cahokia and the northern Effigy Mound Culture may be overturned. At a global scale, the research will provide a new starting point from which to examine peace-making, religious proselytization, and the expansion of civilizations around the world. Knowing how and why this happened - which is to say determining if and how the local and nonlocal groups engaged each other through religion, alliance, or violence - will elucidate the general relationships of politics and religion to cultural change, central to any geopolitical understanding of either the ancient or modern worlds. The broader impacts of the project include refining geophysical-technology applications and expanding the collaborative network of social scientists and public stakeholders. A new generation of indigenous and non-native American archaeologists will be trained, in collaboration with the American Indian Studies program at UW-Madison. Public outreach efforts will be expanded, partly through an interactive web site that will serve as a gateway for students, journalists, and laypersons alike.