Archaeology and Ancient Religion in the American Midcontinent

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Preface

Most of the chapters in this volume began as papers presented at the 2014 Midwestern Archaeological Conference (MAC) annual meeting. The papers were part of a symposium titled Science and Religion in Archaeology: The Legacy of Thomas E. Emerson held in honor of Thomas E. Emerson, Illinois State Archaeologist and director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. At that conference, Emerson received two career achievement awards, one from MAC and one from the Illinois Archaeological Survey. In 2016, he received the Excellence in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Award from the Society for American Archaeology. This award not only recognized his many achievements but also his leadership of an outstanding CRM program, unwritten by the long-term collaboration of the University of Illinois and the Illinois Department of Transportation.

In this volume, the contributors analyze a series of large and diverse datasets, ranging from those of tiny charred seeds to those from the cosmic alignments of mounds. These individual case studies explore the spiritual lives of ancient native peoples, particularly those groups archaeologists have labeled as Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian and who lived and built monuments along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Following Emerson’s example, the contributors both reexamine old collections and use new analytical technologies to analyze large datasets derived from CRM studies. The goal of this volume is twofold: (1) to demonstrate that the material traces of ancient religious practices are not rare and inaccessible, but rather, are common and accessible, especially when researchers employ large datasets, advanced analytical techniques, and new interpretative frameworks; and (2) to demonstrate the research potential and public benefit of large datasets derived from decades of systematic CRM investigations, exemplified by such efforts in Illinois, particularly those in and around the Cahokia site.

Current studies of ancient rituals and religions are undertaken from varied theoretical perspectives. The case studies in this volume can best be characterized as ranging from behavioral archaeology to landscape, agency, and relational approaches. Emerson’s writings about Mississippian ritual and religion, often groundbreaking and provocative, blended the social, structural, and cognitive archaeological approaches of the late twentieth century with the analysis of large datasets generated in the Middle Mississippi Valley over the last half century. The datasets, derived in large part from CRM investigations for Illinois transportation projects in the Cahokia region, have allowed Emerson and colleagues to forge new insights into broader anthropological issues while developing one of the most refined cultural chronologies and subsistence records in North America. In many of the chapters that follow, the contributors build on this foundational information as they investigate ancient religious practices.

Acknowledgments

This volume has benefited from insightful comments provided by Chris Rodning, Cheryl Claassen, and an anonymous reviewer, from production assistance provided by Sarah Boyer and the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, and from assistance provided by University of Alabama Press staff, especially Wendi Schnaufer, Joanna Jacobs, and freelance copyeditor Dawn Hall. The chapter contributors deserve a special note of thanks for crafting important case studies and for weathering the long journey from conference papers to published volume. Each chapter in some way builds on the work of Tom Emerson. Tom helped shape our careers and our perspectives on the archaeological record, and for that we are grateful. Finally, we are grateful to Carrie Wilson, George Strack, and Chloris Lowe, Jr. and Sr., among other tribal representatives, who have over the years shared their views with us. Their views have helped us to understand, in some small measure, indigenous perspectives on the past and on the interconnectedness of life, death, land, and the cosmos.

—Brad H. Koldehoff and Timothy R. Pauketat

Introduction

An Archaeology of Ancient Religious Practices

Brad H. Koldehoff and Timothy R. Pauketat

This volume presents recent research by a group of archaeologists asking new questions about the past by using new analytical techniques and, importantly, big datasets. In the Midcontinent of North America, sizeable data accumulations derived from decades of cultural resource management (CRM) studies, combined with old museum collections, provide researchers with unparalleled opportunities to explore new questions about the lives of ancient native peoples. In past decades, the topics of technology, economy, and political organization held the attention of most researchers, while ritual and religion were largely ignored. However, with increasing frequency such topics are being investigated from varying points of view (e.g., Brown 1997; Claassen 2015; Galloway 1989; Hall 1997; Pauketat 2013a; Reilly and Garber 2007).

Yet we perceive a continued reluctance by some to investigate such topics. We believe this reluctance stems in part from the lingering notion that ancient religious practices are substantially beyond the reach of archaeological methods and datasets (e.g., Hill 1994; O’Brien and Lyman 2000; O’Brien and Wood 1998:2–3). Artifacts or deposits not easily understood in economic or political terms are often classified as ritual or ceremonial and then ignored. James Deetz noticed decades ago that (1967:79) it is a matter of mild joking that all those artifacts which archaeologists cannot identify are automatically classified as ‘ceremonial objects.’ Similarly, John Blacking (1976:3) states jokingly that if you don’t know what it is, say it’s a cult object. Lars Fogelin (2007:59) also notes that archaeologists have long referred to any artifact or feature that was strange, aberrant, or inexplicable as religious, the assumption being that religion consists of those things that have no functional value or are just plain odd. Joanna Brück (1999:329) explains further: "When archaeologists single out these deposits as ‘different’ in some way, they usually assume that this sense of difference or specialness was appreciated and articulated by the ancient people who placed these deposits in the ground. On the contrary, I would argue that we cannot make this a priori assumption. In fact, such finds are distinguished by archaeologists precisely because they look different or ‘odd’ to us."

Accordingly, this volume is about how archaeologists detect and analyze odd artifacts, deposits, and sites, and how they interpret and attempt to understand the meaning and importance of these oddities in relation to the indigenous peoples who created them. These efforts require not only big datasets but also shifts in how we as archaeologists perceive and categorize objects, substances, features, and places. In the following pages, we seek to position the archaeology of precolumbian eastern North America in such a way as to realize, to some extent, the interpretive and explanatory benefits of recognizing the diverse ways of being in, or relating to, the past, present, and future that were previously relegated to the odd realm of the religious and ceremonial. To achieve this in a preliminary fashion, we lay out in this introduction the historical and theoretical terms of what have been labeled relational approaches to the past (Barrett 2000; Jones and Alberti 2013; Watts 2013). We link these approaches to key midwestern archaeologists who have moved in similar directions in the past with regard to the study of religion and animistic ontologies. In particular, we highlight the contributions of Thomas Emerson, whose writings in some ways adapted the social, structural, and cognitive archaeological approaches of the late twentieth century—notably including the provocative work of Robert Hall—by merging it with the great archaeological datasets produced in the Mississippi valley over the last half century.

Since the 1960s the science of archaeology has become more analytically sophisticated and interdisciplinary (e.g., Frankel et al. 2013; Malainey 2011; Pollard and Bray 2007), while at the same time, in river valleys across the United States, intensive CRM investigations have generated immense datasets. Nowhere is this circumstance truer than in the American Bottom. This expanse of Mississippi River floodplain opposite Saint Louis, Missouri, is home to the world-famous Cahokia site and has experienced waves of highway and bridge construction resulting in large and richly detailed datasets. Most recently, investigations for the New Mississippi River Bridge project in East Saint Louis have yielded much new data and insights (e.g., Brennan 2016; Emerson and Koldehoff 2012). Analysis of American Bottom datasets recovered from numerous Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian period deposits has resulted in one of the most refined cultural chronologies and subsistence records in North America (e.g., Emerson 2006; Emerson et al. 2006; Emerson and Walthall 2007). And within this context, new and important insights into the spiritual lives of ancient native peoples, especially those who built Cahokia, have been developed (e.g., Emerson 1982, 1989, 2003, 2015; Emerson et al. 2000; Emerson et al. 2008; Kelly et al. 2008; Pauketat 2008, 2013a; Pauketat et al. 2017).

In this volume, the contributors analyze a series of datasets, ranging from those of tiny charred seeds to those pertaining to the cosmic alignments of mounds. At the core of this volume are chapters (Chapters 1–5) that explore ancient religious practices through the analysis of big datasets from the American Bottom and surrounding Illinois uplands. The other chapters (Chapters 6–8) explore these topics with big datasets from sites and landscapes scattered along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys (Figure I.1).

The contributors examine substances, artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes with the aim of identifying and interpreting the material traces of ancient religious practices. In Chapter 1, Brad H. Koldehoff and Kenneth B. Farnsworth examine changes in the ritual importance of the earliest smoking pipes. Over decades and after searching through many collections, they assembled a large sample of early pipes that document dramatic transformations not only in the shape of pipes but also in the lithic raw materials used in their manufacture. They link these changes to the increased ceremonial importance of pipes in the formulation and spread of Hopewell. In the next four chapters, contributors use large datasets from the American Bottom region. In Chapter 2, Melissa Baltus assembles a database of tool caches gleaned from scores of site reports documenting thousands of excavated features. She explores ritual interpretations of Late Woodland and Mississippian household tool caches, arguing that these caches are not examples of utilitarian resources but rather are examples of religious practices (offerings). In Chapter 3, Kathryn E. Parker and Mary L. Simon use an enormous database of carbonized seeds from Late Woodland and Mississippian feature contexts to identify and highlight the ancient uses of magic plants, such as tobacco, morning glory, and jimsonweed. Summarizing the biochemistry of these plants and their effects on the human mind and body, they propose these plants were integral to public and private rituals because they altered human perceptions and states of consciousness. Kristin M. Hedman and Eve A. Hargrave in Chapter 4 summarize Late Woodland and Mississippian mortuary practices, focusing special attention on results from their reanalysis of Mound 72 interments at Cahokia. Their reanalysis of the famous beaded burial requires a substantive rethinking of the religious and political structure of early Cahokia. In Chapter 5, Susan M. Alt summarizes Mississippian ritual architecture at the Emerald mound site east of Cahokia and relates the buildings and landscape modifications to primarily religious rather than political motivations. To the north in Wisconsin, in Chapter 6, John D. Richards and Thomas J. Zych summarize decades of research at Aztalan and analyze the construction of mounds and landscapes by Late Woodland and Mississippian groups at the site, documenting important similarities and differences between Aztalan and Cahokia. In Chapter 7, Mark J. Wagner, Jonathan Remo, Kayeleigh Sharp, and Go Matsumoto delineate components of an ancient ritual landscape in the Jackson Bottoms of southwestern Illinois. Analyzing decades of research, they highlight mound locations and the reuse of rock art sites as shrines founded by Woodland (and possibly Archaic) populations that later Mississippians maintained and enhanced. In Chapter 8, the final chapter, William F. Romain explores cosmic alignments as the organizing principles by which key Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian mound sites were constructed and from which spiritual powers were derived.

New Perspectives on Science and Religion

How do we human beings in the present, or how did our precursors in the past, relate to each other, other beings, forces, or phenomena? How do we understand our present, our past, and our future? Two fundamental ways of relating might be categorized as science and religion. Certainly, the distinction between science and religion has been used to describe the divide between certain archaeological and nonarchaeological ways of understanding the world (Deloria 2003; Watkins 2001).

The science of archaeology is about understanding people through their material remains. And this volume is about identifying and interpreting the religious practices of ancient native peoples through the analysis of large datasets. As summarized by Fogelin (2007, 2008), archaeological studies of ancient rituals and religions have been undertaken from various theoretical perspectives. The case studies in this volume can best be characterized as ranging from behavioral archaeology to landscape, agency, and relational approaches. The underlying assumptions of this volume are fourfold: (1) humans are innately curious about their surroundings and their place within the cosmos and actively construct understandings and explanations of events, forces, and phenomena; (2) such constructions are not static and do not exist without being constantly enacted, experienced, and remembered; (3) such understandings (some might call them beliefs) inform and guide human actions (including religious practices) which, in turn, take material form and, ultimately, make up the archaeological record (earthen mounds, post molds, stone blades, organic compounds, etc.); and (4) various components of that material form (places, objects, substances, etc.) may have at one time been accorded supernatural powers and garnered great reverence. Thus, the role these places, objects, and substances played in religious practices can be detected, analyzed, and interpreted.

We do not equate the existence of beliefs about the cosmos and its unseen forces with the presence of codified religions, because all people in all times and places relate in some manner to the universe and its mysterious powers. Because of that universality, we can explore the spiritual practices of ancient native peoples by using frames of reference derived from historical and ethnological studies. While we are not advocating a direct historical approach and realize that historical accounts are often flawed and limiting (e.g., Dunnell 1991; Wobst 1978), we do recognize that historical accounts of indigenous practices furnish unique insights into the archaeological record (e.g., Bowser and Zedeño 2009; Hall 1997; Oetelaar 2012).

Early anthropologists often classified the beliefs and rituals of their indigenous subjects as expressions of animism—simply put, the belief that animals, plants, objects like rocks or human-made objects like smoking pipes or pottery vessels, and natural forces like wind and thunder were spiritual or held spiritual power (agency). However, following both A. Irving Hallowell’s seminal ethnology (1976) and a host of more recent indigenous theorists (Deloria 1973; Norton-Smith 2010; Waters 2004), we now appreciate that Native American landscapes were (and are) filled with spirits or beings, both human (ancestral) and other-than-human. Writing of precolumbian and early historic-era Americans, Peter Nabokov (2006:34) nicely summarizes this perspective: Theirs was a world in which sympathy, dependency, and reciprocity bound human beings to plants, animals, rocks and stars. And thus they became beings rather than objects, fellows rather than things, and members of a circle of social relations.

The concept of animism, as originally formulated, equated this way of understanding and interacting with the world as the most primitive of all religions (Tylor 1873). Among current researchers, animism is no longer considered primitive nor are religions routinely placed in an evolutionary ranking (e.g., Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2006; Rappaport 1999). Animistic ways of understanding and interacting with the world blur the lines between the sacred (religious/spiritual) and the profane (utilitarian/domestic) and between belief and practice. The widely accepted Durkheimian (1915 [1995]) distinction between sacred and profane has hindered archaeological studies of rituals and religions, as has the notion that culture is composed of separate economic, social, political, and religious spheres. Indigenous peoples around the world did not make these distinctions—actions were often simultaneously economic, political, and religious as argued by Marcel Mauss (1967) and archaeologists today (e.g., Mills and Walker 2008b; Pauketat 2013a; VanPool and Newsome 2012; Whalen 2013).

In fact, Severin Fowles (2013), in rethinking religion and everyday practice in the Puebloan Southwest, proposes that we drop the word religion altogether. Likewise, Timothy Pauketat contends that the study of religion is more about understanding religious practices and contexts rather than the formal institutions that some would argue are necessary for religion to exist (Pauketat 2013a). Religion, then, becomes what people do (Fowles 2013). After all, no North Americans or Mesoamericans themselves had a word for religion. For them, spirits and gods were omnipresent—in the clays and tempers of pots, in the smoke of tobacco, and in the kernels of the maize plant. Likewise, Caddoan-, Siouan-, and Algonquian-speaking peoples of the historic era recognized that spirits or godly essences might inhabit places, people, or things (Dorsey 1894; Hewitt 1902; Radin 1914). It is impossible to strictly segregate ritual or sacred contexts and activities from domestic or profane ones. To use this new perspective, archaeologists must develop new interpretative frameworks.

Archaeological efforts, especially those of processual archaeologists, have tended to focus on these separate spheres of culture, imposing modernist frames of reference. These approaches to human experience (which include both materialist and idealist traditions in archaeology) treat materials, spaces, architectural constructions, imagery, landscapes, and even the human body as if they are secondary expressions of otherwise-unseen social organizations or cultural structures (Barrett 2000). This kind of representationalism has its roots in modernist or Cartesian philosophies, which infamously and uncritically separate mind, thought, and culture, on the one hand, from body, action, and behavior, on the other, as if the opposing dualisms were real. But in non-Cartesian realities, these dualisms are the biased abstractions of analysts (Alberti et al. 2011; Harvey 2006; Meskell 2004).

As opposed to processualist or modernist archaeologies, we recognize that key archaeological localities, contexts, and periods allow new theoretical and methodological insights into the past generally, if not also into the relationships between science, religion, and ontology specifically. By ontology we mean one’s way of being or relating to or perceiving the world. For instance, the tools and cultural objects long analyzed only in technological and economic terms may now be understood alternatively as animate or agentic, able to influence how people act and what they do (Alberti and Bray 2009; Gell 1998; Jones and Boivin 2010). Similarly, places, landforms, and entire landscapes may be understood to have held power over people. Living around places, landforms, and landscapes or moving through them imparts to human existence a spiritual if not religious dimension (Basso 1996; Bowser and Zedeño 2009; Claassen 2016; Oetelaar 2012; Thornton 2008).

At the scale of the everyday, people experience substances and contexts that affect their very being and, by extension, their histories (Hamilakis 2013). This extends right down to the practices of selecting specific raw materials to make specific tools and objects (see Chapters 1 and 2), caching artifacts (Chapter 2), and depositing construction fills or refuse (Chapters 5 and 6). New interpretations of these seemingly mundane tasks are causing researchers to rethink traditional archaeological notions of refuse deposits and discard patterns; for example, a broken pot or pipe is not necessarily refuse (e.g., Baltus and Baires 2012; Cameron 2002; Joyce and Pollard 2010; Mills and Walker 2008a; Pauketat 2008; Whalen 2013).

As discussed by Benjamin Alberti and colleagues (2011:897), relational approaches to archaeology fit into a broad reorientation of anthropological theory: We are currently in the midst of an immense project of metaphysical renegotiation; within archaeology we witness this as a movement away from the common ontology, where the past exists apart from the present, toward an ontology where pasts are spatially coextensive. Such relational points of view in archaeology sprung from landscape, agency, and memory-related approaches in archaeology and anthropology in the 1990s which, in turn, were made possible by the so-called post-processual and cognitive turns of the 1980s and early 1990s (Hodder 1982, 1986, 1989; Renfrew 1994). Most of these earlier takes on the past already recognized the historical impacts of people, places, things, imagery, and other-than-human entities on each other in ways that could not be reduced to summaries of economic systems, social groups, or cultures (Basso 1996; Bowser and Zedeño 2009; Walker 2008). The landscape, agency, and memory-related approaches rejected the assumptions that cultural meanings, values, or functions existed in the past waiting to be decoded or deduced in the present (Ashmore 2004; Dobres and Robb 2000; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003).

Of course, the intersections or engagements of people, places, things, substances, and experiences do take material form and occupy space. As a result, they leave behind traces that are measurable. This principle (that social and cultural or cognitive phenomena exist outside the brain in things, bodies, and places) is a component of many contemporary approaches in archaeology (Renfrew et al. 2004). The ontological turn in archaeology, however, extends this principle to a deeper relational level of the human experience. That is, the materials themselves, along with their spatial, physical, and experiential qualities, afford certain kinds of engagements, associations, or relationships with other things, beings, substances, or phenomena that, in turn, have historical implications not just for what people do but for what people are—as beings—with respect to other beings, other powers, and other agencies.

Such relationships happen among people and other sentient beings via the senses (Hamilakis 2013; Hurcombe 2008; Pauketat 2013a; Skeates 2008). They might also have a genealogical or historical component thanks to the ways that people remember them (Mills and Walker 2008b). But none exist with any permanence or continuity without somehow being continuously remembered, reinvented, or in some ways remade or reexperienced. Cultural relationships, associations, and engagements, that is, are part of an ongoing historical process that is neither static nor fixed. The upshot: there is no cultural continuity except that people, as part of a wider world, actively produce it.

Rituals, as the repetitive engagements of people in places, with things, and through unseen powers, create continuity and produce material traces. But not all rituals are religious in nature. Indeed, we might consider the rituality of everyday practice, public performance, or domestic context, where ritual is that aspect of an enactment or experience that draws on the past in a repetitive or methodical fashion (Bell 1997). Such rituals often, but do not necessarily, involve a religious dimension. That is, they may or may not invoke spiritual powers. If they do, then we must also consider the religiosity of such contexts, where religion is that dimension of social life closely tied to the cosmic or mystical order of the world (Geertz 1973; Hewitt 1902; Müller 1892; Tylor 1873), and religions are formalized or institutionalized entities that people isolate in discourse or practice (Hinnells 2007).¹

The Archaeology of Powerful Places and Things

The principles by which Native American priests, rulers, specialists, and others understood the world were unlike those that undergird much of the modern world as we know it (Deloria 2006). These nonmodern ontologies, characterized as animistic, were full of animate powers or forces seen and unseen that might impinge on the lives of people. Through their inhabitation or possession by spirits or beings, things, places, landforms, and entire landscapes might become alive or animate. Among the most frequently animated or empowered materials, phenomena, or spaces were the most elemental and routinely experienced: earth, sky, sun, moon, smoke, fire, tobacco, feathers, skins, rocks, and paint. Such things were commonly bundled, or wrapped up into packages that might be consulted on special occasions by specially trained human beings (Pauketat 2013a; Zedeño 2008). According to Preston Holder (1970:213), bundles were portable ceremonial centers. Both the bundles and the bundled contents had animate properties. They were powerful objects as noted by M. R. Harrington (1914:126), and the bundles are as sacred to the Indian as his bible to the orthodox Christian.

Archaeologists have identified what appear to be the durable remains or contents of bundles (e.g., Bluhm and Liss 1961:115; Claassen 2015:237–238; Webb and Baby 1957:72–76). Certain caches (or hoards) of objects might be remnants of bundles or similar ritual accumulations (Chapter 2). The historical literature is rife with examples of ritual bundles and powerful objects. Edwin James (1823:325–326) recorded his encounter with a large shell (probably marine shell) held in great esteem by the Omaha:

The shell, which is regarded as an object of great sanctity and superstitious reverence, by the whole nation, has been transmitted from the ancestry of this band, and its origin is unknown. A skin lodge or temple is appropriated for its preservation, in which a person constantly resides, charged with the care of it. . . . It is concealed from sight by several envelops, which are composed of strands of proper skins, plaited and joined together. . . . The whole constitutes a parcel [bundle] of considerable size, from which various articles are suspended, such as tobacco and roots of certain plants.

. . . the sacred shell is consulted as an oracle. For this purpose, the magi of the band seat themselves around the great medicine lodge . . . the exterior envelop is carefully removed . . . that the shell may receive air. A portion of the tobacco, consecrated by being long suspended to the . . . coverings of the shell, is now taken and distributed to the magi, who fill their pipes with it, to smoke the great medicine. During this ceremony, an individual occasionally inclines his head forward, and listens attentively to catch some sound which he expects to issue from the shell.

Both large and small stones, often unmodified, were accorded great reverence because of their power and history. For instance, Frances Densmore (1932:9) documents a boulder located in the middle of the main road into the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin. The road had been a native trail, and the boulder is known as spirit rock, because an old man had a dream and told the people there was a spirit in that rock. A similar boulder was discovered during mound excavations at the Aztalan site. Given its location and that it was wrapped in bark, S. A. Barrett (1933:285) infers that this rock is in fact a spirit stone and that the people of ancient Aztalan considered certain stones to be the abodes of spirits (see also Chapter 6 in this volume). Certain pebbles, fossils, and crystals were accorded reverence because of their healing and other powers (Claassen 2015; Koldehoff and Bukowski 2010). For example, as reported by Vine Deloria (2006:156), A small stone, which is usually a fossil shell of some kind, is known by the Blackfeet as I-nis’-kim, or the buffalo stone. This object is strong medicine, and . . . gives its possessor great power with buffalo.

It is not that the objects were a separate order of being as much as they were able to channel the powers that affected the lives of human beings—they had gained meaning and importance to individuals and entire nations. In terms of the archaeological record, empowered objects might be rare or carefully crafted items like carved stone figures, effigy vessels, smoking pipes; or exceptionally long, thin flint blades; or simple items like unmodified rocks, fossils, and bones. The identification of empowered objects depends in large part on their depositional context as well as the source location and physical characteristics of the raw materials from which they are made (e.g., Adams 2008; Cameron 2002; Mills and Walker 2008b; Torrence 2005; Whalen