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-Ã -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.
Although "culture contacts" are known to have occurred in ancient North America, most are thought to have been one-off events of little historical consequence. However, our recent "Mississippian Initiative" excavations in western Wisconsin have provided evidence for a sustained Cahokian colony dating to AD 1050-1100, or the period immediately after the so-called "big bang" when the great site of Cahokia coalesced into a true pre-Columbian city. The importance of our findings includes the ways in which they change a scientific understanding of early civilization and, by extension, the place of religion in all cultural expansions past and present. Between 2009 and 2011, archaeological investigations were undertaken at the farming settlement of Fisher, near Stoddard, Wisconsin, and four locations at the so-called Trempealeau complex, a series of habitation areas and two mounded public precincts known as the Little Bluff, Squier Garden, Pelkey, and Uhl sites. Both sites are located near the unusual geological features of the Driftless Area of the Upper Mississippi Valley. In all, the remains of 12 Cahokian buildings were found in our excavations of 1100 square meters of mound fill, residential areas, and ritual middens. In addition, a possible Cahokian sweatlodge detected in a gradiometer survey. Artifacts recovered from in and around these buildings include broken Cahokian pots, minimal food refuse, and an assortment of tools imported from Cahokia, 800 river kilometers to the south. From details of the deposits, we conclude that Cahokians returned repeatedly to this western Wisconsin location at the very inception of their city, possibly to maintain the Trempealeau temple complex. Possibly, this religious outreach was key to the rise of the city of Cahokia, and archaeologists in other locations might use these results to look for religious foundations to their civilizations. Our excavations into the flat-topped earthen pyramid atop Little Bluff are especially noteworthy. No domestic refuse was encountered anywhere on Little Bluff, implying that the mound complex served a religious purpose. Test units in a narrow causeway between the two main borrow pits and leading to Mound 1 revealed that this ramp had been intentionally constructed by (or for) the Cahokians, providing not only a confined access way, but also symmetry to the mound and causeway complex. Our one-meter wide T-shaped trench on the north end of Mound 1, and another on Mound 3 revealed that pyramid had been constructed in a single event using three distinct construction fills, typical of Cahokian religious practices. Taken together, the Fisher and Trempealeau evidence points to a short-term colony of Cahokians who selected a unique location to establish a temple complex. The Cahokians who came to Trempealeau brought everything that they needed from their homeland. Conceivably, the "North" for them may have been a land associated with powerful stories and strange properties and, to ensure the success of their city back home, they occupied this location and, possibly, attempted to convert local peoples to their beliefs.
