Land of Water, City of the Dead: Religion and Cahokia's Emergence

LAND OF WATER, CITY OF THE DEAD

Archaeology of the American South: New Directions and Perspectives

SERIES EDITOR

Christopher B. Rodning

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Robin A. Beck

John H. Blitz

I. Randolph Daniel Jr.

Kandace R. Hollenbach

Patrick C. Livingood

Tanya M. Peres

Thomas J. Pluckhahn

Mark A. Rees

Amanda L. Regnier

Sissel Schroeder

Lynne P. Sullivan

Ian Thompson

Richard A. Weinstein

Gregory D. Wilson

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

LAND OF WATER, CITY OF THE DEAD

RELIGION AND CAHOKIA’S EMERGENCE

SARAH E. BAIRES

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: Cahokia’s inundation, a view of Borrow Pit 5-2; photograph by Alleen Betzenhauser

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1952-6

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9124-9

To my husband

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Histories and Perspectives of Religion and Landscapes

1. Living Landscapes: Cahokia’s Natural and Urban Environments

2. The Complexity of Religion

3. Cahokia’s Ridge-Top Mounds

4. Constructing Mortuary Spaces: Rattlesnake and Wilson Mounds

5. Beings, Shells, and Water in Burial Practice

6. Toward an Indigenous Archaeology of Religion

References

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1. American Bottom region and location of Cahokia, East St. Louis, and St. Louis

1.2. Cahokia Precinct

1.3. Chronology of Cahokia and the American Bottom region

1.4. Elevations of southern Cahokia Precinct

1.5. LiDAR view of Cahokia Central Precinct

3.1. Ramey pottery vessel and tripartite division of cosmos

3.2. Rattlesnake Causeway as viewed from Rattlesnake Mound

3.3. Powell Mound destruction

3.4. Powell Mound bundle burials and associated materials

3.5. Mound 72 plan map

4.1. Rattlesnake Mound area

4.2. Location of Rattlesnake Causeway excavations

4.3. Rattlesnake Causeway southern trench profile, showing fill zones

4.4. Rattlesnake Mound excavations from 1927 and 2011

4.5. Rattlesnake Mound wall-trench building

4.6. 1927 J. L. B. Taylor Rattlesnake Mound excavations plan map

4.7. Wilson Mound excavation plan map

4.8. Burial Complex #3 Wilson Mound

5.1. Cut marks, Burial Complex #3, Wilson Mound

5.2. Busycon sinistrum bead types and portions of shell used in manufacture of beads

5.3. Busycon sinistrum beads, Wilson Mound shell beads Burial Complex #3

Tables

1.1. American Bottom Geographic Zones and Resources

3.1. Ridge-Top Mounds at Cahokia, East St. Louis, St. Louis, and Mitchell Sites

3.2. Ridge-Top Mound Features

4.1. Wilson Mound Occupation and Construction Episodes

5.1. Bundle Burial Descriptions and Minimum Number of Individuals in Burial Complex, #3, Wilson Mound

Acknowledgments

This book is a product of seven years of study and research with many people to acknowledge and thank. First, I would like to thank my mentor, Tim Pauketat, who provided me with the opportunity to learn how to do a different kind of archaeology, one concerned with history, agency, and big questions of complexity and religion. Second, I would like to thank Lisa Lucero, Stanley Ambrose, and Christina Halperin for their comments on a much earlier draft of this project. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful and constructive feedback on this book.

The research herein was funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant and the Forrest N. Baker award from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site (specifically, Bill Iseminger and Mark Esarey), the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (specifically, Tom Emerson, Kris Hedman, and Eve Hargrave), the Illinois Historic State Preservation Agency, the Smithsonian Institution, the Illinois State Museum, and the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology also supported this endeavor through access to collections and permissions to conduct my excavations. I would like to thank Bill Iseminger and Mark Esarey, who provided me access to the Rattlesnake Mound and Causeway for my excavations, and also with notes and artifacts from previous work conducted at the causeway and at Wilson Mound. I would also like to thank Tom Emerson and Mike Farkas (of ISAS) for help with and access to the LiDAR imaging of Cahokia and the Rattlesnake area. Additional thanks to Terry Norris who sparked my interest in the Rattlesnake Causeway and helped formulate the early components of this research.

Thank you to Kris Hedman and Eve Hargrave for their guidance on the human remains component of this project. Thank you to Amanda Butler, Al Betzenhauser, Jeff Kruchten, Jacob Skousen, and Melissa Baltus for their help excavating and mapping the ever-elusive Rattlesnake Causeway. I would also like to acknowledge the 2011 University of Illinois field school students who contributed directly to the excavations of Rattlesnake Mound reported in this book.

I must also thank and acknowledge the women who constitute CABB: incredible friends, supporters, and archaeologists who provide help when needed, advice, and companionship. I am grateful to all the late nights of talking archaeology, which no doubt informed parts of this book. I must also specifically acknowledge Melissa Baltus and her early mentorship, which developed into a great friendship. She was an invaluable part of the excavations presented in this book; I am glad we finally learned how to draw complicated profiles together.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, family, and friends for their support over the years. These brief acknowledgments would not be complete without a word of thanks to my husband, Francisco, who has been my horizon line, keeping me focused and driven to the end.

Introduction

Histories and Perspectives of Religion and Landscapes

The spirit of place is embedded deeply within us; we are connected to something larger than ourselves.

—Johnpaul Jones, 2008

This book is about religion and landscapes. It is about the entanglement of religion with every aspect of social life and the unique ability of archaeology to access and investigate that entanglement. It is about the embodiment of religion in the land and how places create, transform, and make meaningful practices and beliefs. In the short history of archaeological inquiry in Native North America, the topic of religion has often been addressed as a monolithic and structuring system of beliefs observable materially as a set of unique ritual practices, monumental architecture, and special-use buildings or places (see Fogelin 2007, for example). Such studies often attempt to delineate a religion mitigated by orthodoxy and formality resulting in a bounded view of human practice and belief. Yet, these perspectives developed out of a unique moment in anthropological and archaeological history (see Fowles 2013 for a review) that began a very important process of engaging with religion from a material perspective. Religious belief and practice are material, but they are not bounded or passive. I engage with religion, in the context of Native North America, as relational, generative, and dynamic (e.g., Alberti and Bray 2009; Ingold 2011; Pauketat 2013a). Religion is entangled with politics, social change, and every-day practice. Within this perspective, religion is all about agency.

In the pages that follow, I examine the fundamental relationships between religious belief and practice and the emergence of large-scale human societies with a specific focus on Cahokia—Native North America’s largest city north of Mexico (ca. AD 1050–1400). To truly examine the various manifestations of religion in practice, monument construction, and land modification, one must deconstruct the term religion itself, "and rather than assuming that the category has content and seeking to specify what that content is, recognize that the concept of religion as we understand it (and hence tend to define it) is a by-product of the special historical and political circumstances of Western modernity" (Arnal and McCutcheon 2013:28; emphasis original). As such, we cannot move forward with unpacking the relationships among religion, practice, landscape, and the emergence of Cahokia without first examining the concept itself, its many iterations, and how it will be used in this book (see Chapter 3). Thinking through the historical context of religion as a concept, and if and how this can be useful when examining Native American ontological beliefs is a central focus of this project. I engage with theories of relationality alongside Native American perspectives and discussions of religion to challenge and change the previous binaries (e.g., sacred/secular) imposed upon the Indigenous past. Is this a lofty endeavor? Yes, but it is necessary to fully embrace the nuanced history of places like Cahokia.

Through a perspective that builds upon theories of bundling (Pauketat 2013a; see also Ingold 1993, 2007; Latour 2005), relational ontologies (Alberti and Bray 2009; Alberti and Marshal 2009; Zedeño 2008, 2009), and archaeologies of doings (Fowles 2013), I argue that religion at Cahokia was comprised of multitemporal and multidimensional practices. These practices emphasize relationships with both the built and natural landscape of this early city. I take the perspective that studies of religion should attempt to understand how religion– as performed in the open, practiced on the landscape, and experienced in and through things, elements, and substances– was related to human history (Pauketat states 2013a:6). Engaging with history is central to understanding the processes that constitute social life. Cahokia was more than a collection of earthen mounds and public plazas; it was a place rooted in history born out through a unique connection with the land.

In addition to engaging with religion from an ontological perspective, I am primarily concerned with landscape, the history of place, the physical construction of the built environment, and what people do with and in such spaces. I argue that Cahokia was not only a planned city built for economic and political purposes but also a spiritual place, one related to ancestors, gods, and the cosmos through the land. As Vine Deloria Jr. (2003:292) states, Peoples and lands can relate to each other in a very powerful manner to develop a spiritual unity . . . [and] [o]nce developing roots . . . the land and the religion apparently become as one. Deloria’s statement foregrounds the connections, nay, the embeddedness of spirituality in the land; his statement provides a touchstone to help explore the many and varied spiritual, temporal, and material relationships entrenched in Cahokia’s landscape. It may follow that the Cahokian landscape was intimately tied to and possibly subsumed by religion. By this I mean that one could not separate the growing of maize from the Mother Earth, or the construction of a mound from engaging with the known creation stories of the lived-in world (see Deloria 2003; Echo-Hawk Jr. 2009; Hall 1997; Hallowell 1960; Ingold 2013). Land is alive and thinking and . . . humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts (V. Watts 2013:21).

Such relationships are important to understanding a past ontologically different than that of the West, where the land is not just something to be acted upon but rather is an actor(s) itself. Deloria (2003:65–66) states, "The structure of their [American Indian] religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from their relationships with other forms of life. Context is therefore all-important for both practice and the understanding of reality. The places where revelations were experienced were remembered and set aside as locations where, through rituals and ceremonials, the people could once again communicate with the spirits . . . It was not what people believed to be true that was important but what they experienced as true (emphasis added). He emphasizes the importance of the land in Native American ontology and highlights some possible reasons behind the desire to construct such a place as Cahokia: significant or historical places located in the natural topography and/or locations that may cite connections to ancestors and/or the movements of celestial bodies. This perspective, which can be described as Place-Thought engages with the relationships between action (experience) and belief (V. Watts 2013). These reasons cite the permanency and rootedness that the Indian sacred places represent, switching the structure of religious reality from a temporal scale to a spatial framework" (Deloria 2003:67). The focus is not on the Western or Christian method of preaching belief, but rather on a community of relationships with place, material, people, and the cosmos at the center.

In addition to reevaluating religion from a relational perspective, I explore social and political complexity, and what it means to be a complex society. I examine how social/political complexities and religion, in the case of Cahokia, are not mutually exclusive concepts. Just as the Catholic Church held influence over political leaders in medieval Europe, Cahokian leaders may have shared a similar experience, one that focused on the interrelatedness of politics, religious belief, and the manifestation of those beliefs in the practices, buildings, and monuments that constructed their city. I re-evaluate the traditional notions of political power and religion by focusing not on leaders, ritual, and control, but rather on relationships, networks, and doings (Alberti and Bray 2009; Alberti and Marshal 2009; Fowles 2013; Ingold 2007; Latour 2005; Pauketat 2013a; Zedeño 2008, 2009). I do this through an analysis of the built and natural landscapes of Cahokia ca. AD 1050–1200, with a particular focus on ridge-top mortuary mounds, associated practices, places, and materials.

Ridge-Tops and Histories

Questions regarding the role of ridge-top mortuary mounds, these elongated mounds of earth with a peaked summit, have typically emphasized their economic, political, functional, and/or ritual roles (see Brown 1995, 1997, 2003, 2010; Fowler 1997; Goldstein 2000; Porubcan 2000; see also Pauketat 2010). Such seminal studies examined ridge-top mounds as separate, sequential mortuary events, considering the mounds themselves as a political tool and a product of Cahokia’s emergence. Ridge-tops were described as monuments constructed to mark site boundaries and as places to bury the Cahokian elite (see for example Brown 2010; Fowler et al. 1999).

Building on these previous perspectives, I engage with ridge-tops as the embodiment of relationships made material through religious practice, belief, landscapes, and mortuary processes. Combing legacy data from foundational excavations conducted by W. K. Moorehead and Preston Holder with my excavations into Rattlesnake Mound and my reanalysis of the Wilson Mound collections, I examine these relationships as generative of cultural change (sensu Pauketat 2010; see also Janusek 2006). Where others have examined these monuments as singular, monumental constructions, and a product of the emergence of Cahokia, I focus on the role of these mounds in the creation of Cahokia as part of a new religious movement that, in a way, revived mortuary and mound building practices with origins in the Archaic and Hopewell phenomenon of the Eastern Woodlands. This is a perspective that engages with the longue durée, focusing on how practices of community layout, mound building, and burial of the dead are all based in a deep history of relationships with the land. This is explored specifically at the ridge-top mound, Rattlesnake. Here, Cahokian persons revisited this mound after its initial construction to raise a new building that simultaneously reinterpreted religious belief and practice by re-orienting space, while maintaining burial practices that harkened back to foundational episodes of burying bodies in comingled contexts (see Chapter 4). In addition, the sequence of events at other ridge-tops—Wilson Mound, Mound 72, and Powell Mound— highlight this historical knowledge, addressing details of events and construction while engaging with the temporality of these spaces in relation to one another and to other mounds, plaza, and neighborhood construction events of early Cahokia.

I also focus on the significance of the location, chronological sequence, and construction of Cahokia’s ridge-top mortuary mounds and the affiliated Rattlesnake Causeway—a 1 km–long raised earthen walkway connecting the southernmost ridge-top (Rattlesnake) to the city’s central precinct. Earlier interpretations of these monuments and mortuary landscapes as elite burial grounds or mass graves for whole lineages, as monumental sign posts delineating the edges of the Cahokian community, or as collective representation and cosmological tableaus, have yet to account for the diversity of practice and the deep historical ties of these mounds to the early days of Cahokia (see Brown 1995, 1997, 2003, 2010; Fowler 1997; Goldstein 2000; Porubcan 2000; see also Pauketat 2010). In what follows, I examine the role of ridge-tops as sites embedded in a complex history, one with direct ties to the emergence of this place.

Moreover, an archaeological analysis of these monuments must consider Native American histories and beliefs. The study of Native American mortuary practice and human remains is a tenuous and complicated process at best; it must employ a perspective that moves beyond colonial discourse to actively incorporate Native American ontology, but not just in the form of ethnographic analogy—although this can be a productive starting place. Ontological approaches require rigorous archaeological research combined with a theoretical perspective that considers the relational aspects of practice and belief as they are related to being-in-the-world (see Ingold 2013). This perspective allows for the consideration that Cahokia’s ridge-tops were intentionally built to fulfill multiple purposes and to effect and to create the knowable and experiential world. I explore this further in the discussion of the Rattlesnake Causeway, for one, which indicates that ridge-top mounds were not strictly isolated spaces but were actively incorporated into the organizational plan of Cahokia, tying together seemingly disparate locals with the central core of the site. When we look at the macro-scale relationships among ridge-tops, the causeway, and the broader Cahokia precinct, we begin to see patterns of landscape use emerge.

Patterns of shared yet diverse practices, methods of mound construction, and location of ridge-top mounds suggest that Cahokia’s emergence was intimately tied to the introduction and traditions of a new religion. I use the words new and religion to identify such practices unique to the City of Cahokia. Religious beliefs or practices, it can be argued, existed prior to Cahokia, but the scale of practice, associated monuments and materials identified archaeologically at Cahokia, were unique to the Mississippian period (AD 1050–1400). Such changes to the American Bottom landscape ca. AD 1050 introduced new ways of being and doing to Terminal Late Woodland horticulturalists that significantly altered their daily lived experience (Pauketat 1994, 2013a; see also Alt 2002, 2010a; Emerson 1997; Kelly 1990). These changes, I argue, were intentional and purposeful, rather than environmental or evolutionary, and reconfigured the way people lived as well as drastically reshaping the natural and historically occupied landscape.

Others have argued that such changes were due in part to the introduction of a new religion (Brown 1997, 2003; Emerson et al. 2008; Hall 1997, 2000; Pauketat 2013a; Pauketat and Emerson 1991), but I suggest that this new religion, via ridge-top mounds and associated spaces, practices, and events, urbanized Cahokia City (which includes the three precincts of Cahokia, St. Louis, and East St. Louis). As such I do not intend to propose that, prior to Cahokia, Late Woodland, Hopewell, and Archaic period communities did not have religion, as much as one can have something that is ever-changing and ethereal, but rather that the practices and landscapes intimately tied to such religious beliefs were strikingly distinct both in scale and tradition at Cahokia. Such practices were potentially part of a revitalization of previous mortuary practices, beliefs, and mound construction with roots in the Hopewell and even the Archaic period (see Hallowell 1960; Pauketat 2013a; see also Brown 1997; Emerson et al. 2008).

Although Cahokia, the city, is a uniquely large and complex community unlike anything before or after it, it is also a revitalization of practices embedded in the land. From an historical perspective, relational ontology is a way of experiencing, navigating, and understanding a multiscalar world with infinite relationships (see Harvey 2006a; see also Alberti and Marshall 2009). It is this recognition of various relationships that creates a multidimensional reality that engages with places and persons in the present, but also with different temporalities, different scales, and different histories as identifiable, in this context, through the built landscape.

Relational ontology, as one way of viewing and engaging with the world, draws upon histories. I explore such histories particularly through an investigation of the way Native Cahokians constructed the built landscape, through citing and revisiting places of past practice and knowledge. Drawing upon legacy data from past excavations and my own recent work at Rattlesnake Mound, I discuss ridge-top mound construction by examining spaces of aboriginal re-excavation and reburial of human remains. In these contexts the living interacted with the past, rediscovering mound construction processes and events as well as engaging with historical ancestors. In this event, time was (and is) not linear; it is circular and malleable simultaneously combining past and present. In particular, the late addition mortuary building at Rattlesnake Mound potentially cited past practices like those performed at Wilson Mound, Mound 72, and Powell Mound. This required the reconfiguration of building orientations and the associated dead while inventing a new way of constructing mortuary space (see Chapter 5). In this way, the processes of relating to the natural and social environments, to persons, and to places is both historical and generative of social change.

Social change can occur when people choose to re-invent and re-imagine past practices. Using Hopewell as an example, Hopewellian persons constructed large earthen mounds and also employed celestial alignments to organize their built landscape (see Lepper 2004; Romain and Burks 2008; Van Nest et al. 2001). This knowledge can also be traced back to the Archaic period and Poverty Point, where similar processes of moving earth to build large mounds was employed (see Kidder 2010). From the Archaic period to Hopewell to Cahokia, we see a re-invention of mound construction and earth moving as well as aligning those mounds to specific celestial bodies. At each iteration of this practice, changes