Life in a Mississippian Warscape: Common Field, Cahokia, and the Effects of Warfare

By Meghan E. Buchanan

Analyzes Mississippian daily life at Cahokia’s environs during wartime
 
In Life in a Mississippian Warscape: Common Field, Cahokia, and the Effects of Warfare Meghan E. Buchanan posits that to understand the big histories of warfare, political fragmentation, and resilience in the past archaeologists must also analyze and interpret the microscale actions of the past. These are the daily activities of people before, during, and after historical events. Within warscapes, battles take place in peoples’ front yards, family members die, and the impacts of violence in near and distant places are experienced on a daily basis. This book explores the microscale of daily lives of people living at Common Field, a large, palisaded mound center, during the period of Cahokia’s abandonment and the spread of violence and warfare throughout the Southeast.

Linking together ethnographic, historic, and archaeological sources, Buchanan discusses the evidence that the people of Common Field engaged in novel and hybrid practices in these dangerous times. At the microscale, they adopted new ceramic tempering techniques, produced large numbers of serving vessels decorated with warfare-related imagery, adapted their food practices, and erected a substantial palisade with specially prepared deposits. The overall picture that emerges at Common Field is of a people who engaged in risk-averse practices that minimized their exposure to outside of the palisade and attempted to seek intercession from otherworldly realms through public ceremonies involving warfare-related iconography.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394202

Book preview

LIFE IN A MISSISSIPPIAN WARSCAPE

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

LIFE IN A MISSISSIPPIAN WARSCAPE

COMMON FIELD, CAHOKIA, AND THE EFFECTS OF WARFARE

MEGHAN E. BUCHANAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

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

Typeface: Caslon

Cover design: David Nees

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

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2138-3

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9420-2

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Fog of War

CHAPTER ONE

Making War

CHAPTER TWO

Mississippian Warscapes: Approaches to and Histories of Mississippian Warfare

CHAPTER THREE

The Common Field Site: Context and Regional Culture History

CHAPTER FOUR

Common Field, Common Lives?: Results of Analysis

CHAPTER FIVE

Life, Death, and Destruction in a Mississippian Warscape

CHAPTER SIX

Big Histories, Small Practices

Notes

References Cited

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1.1. Location of Common Field, other Mississippian period sites, and the Vacant Quarter

3.1. Map of Common Field region and associated sites

3.2. Chronologies for the Saline Locality, Jefferson County, and the American Bottom

3.3. Map of the broader Common Field region and sites discussed in the text

3.4. Two avian figures, Bushnell Ceremonial Cave

3.5. Map of the Common Field site

3.6. Aerial photograph of Common Field after the 1979 flood

3.7. Map of surface stains from the 1980 control block

3.8. Calibrated radiocarbon dates from Bauman and Common Field

3.9. Plan map of features in Excavation Block 1

3.10. Plan map of features in Excavation Block 2

3.11. Plan map of features in Excavation Block 3

3.12. Plan map of features in Excavation Block 4

4.1. Scatterplot of deer bone density and skeletal element abundance

4.2. Fauna by class, percent number of identified specimens, at Common Field

4.3. Common Field fauna compared with Stirling phase assemblages

4.4. Common Field fauna compared with Moorehead phase assemblages

4.5. Common Field fauna compared with Moorehead and Sand Prairie phase American Bottom assemblages

4.6. Common Field fauna compared with Kincaid, Orendorf, and Myer-Dickson assemblages

4.7. Deer food utility indexes at Common Field and other sites

4.8. Deer anatomical units at Common Field and other sites

4.9. Comparison of analyses by vessel morphology and temper

4.10. Ceramic tempering agents at Common Field

4.11. Microscopic digital cross-section of a rim from Feature 25

4.12. Proportions of different temper types at Common Field and other Mississippian sites

4.13. Proportions of vessels present at Common Field and other Mississippian sites

4.14. Selected profiles of plate and jar rims from Common Field and contemporaneous sites in the American Bottom

4.15. Rim protrusion ratio boxplots

4.16. Common Field plate decoration Category 1

4.17. Common Field plate decoration Categories 2, 3, 4, and 5

5.1. Simplified depiction of motifs commonly associated with Birdman and/or human/avian beings

TABLES

3.1. Radiocarbon Assays for Common Field and Bauman

4.1. Regional Faunal Assemblages

4.2. Taxa Present at Common Field by Number of Identified Specimens and Minimum Number of Individuals

4.3. Measures of Taxonomic Heterogeneity and Evenness

4.4. Measures of Taxonomic Similarity

4.5. Summary of Ceramic Vessels and Temper

4.6. T-Tests Assuming Unequal Variances for Rim Protrusion Ratios

Acknowledgments

I first saw the Common Field site in the summer of 2002. After a grueling summer of excavating the Grossmann site, University of Illinois field school students participated in a rite of passage: the Terry Norris Extravaganza. Beginning at Cahokia and ending at Taum Sauk Mountain, Terry Norris and Tim Pauketat took us to sites along the Mississippi River. In Ste. Genevieve we toured French Colonial houses, ate some of the world’s best onion rings at the Anvil, and enjoyed mint coolers at Sara’s Ice Cream. Terry took us to the top of the bluffs overlooking the floodplain and told us about the 1979 flood that exposed the burned features at Common Field. Since hearing that story, I wanted to go back and learn more about the people who lived there. Thank you, Terry and Tim.

This book is a product of work that started bubbling in that summer of 2002 but really was the result of many years of research. I would like to thank Susan Alt who taught me field archaeology nearly two decades ago and then provided me with the tools to think big about archaeology in the ensuing years. Stacie King, Laura Scheiber, and Rinku Roy Chowdhury provided guidance and feedback on earlier drafts of this project. I am also grateful to Greg Wilson, Chris Rodning, and an anonymous reviewer who provided thoughtful and constructive feedback on drafts of this book. Thank you also to Wendi Schnaufer and everyone at the University of Alabama Press for all of your hard work.

The research in this book was funded in part by a Wenner Gren Grant (#8366), a Foundation for Restoration of Ste. Genevieve Research Award, an Indiana University Department of Anthropology David C. Skomp Research Feasibility Award, and an Auburn University New Faculty Semester Release from Teaching Grant. The Foundation for Restoration of Ste. Genevieve also graciously allowed me to rent their office (the historic Kiel Schwent house) as a field house and lab space. A huge thank you goes out to the Roth family, especially Robert and Paul, who allowed me access to Common Field over the course of several seasons. Thank you also goes out to the staffs at the University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology and the Illinois State Archaeological Survey for access to collections and documents.

Fieldwork for this project was aided by a motley crew of helpers. First and foremost of those who contributed their time and labor is Eli Konwest. Eli spent two summers with me at Common Field, and she was my writing buddy at Indiana; I could not have completed this without her. Sheena Ketchum and Ryan Jackson spent months at the site helping to excavate. Liz Watts Malouchos, Maura Hogan, Dawn Rutecki, Rebecca Barzilai, Tim Pauketat, Jeff Kruchten, Erin Benson, Eraina Nossa, Alex Badillo, Marty Harmon, Mat Terry, Julia Kahle, Kayln Donohue, Anna Poling, and Matt Park all volunteered at the site.

I am eternally grateful for the relationships I have established along the way. The Women of the Coalition have been a source of inspiration, encouragement, and friendship for years. You all are the best. Allison Foley and Jayne-Leigh Thomas provided hours of conversations and feedback and continue to provide support and encouragement even if we have most of our talks through chat and text these days. A special thank you goes out to April Sievert. To all of my friends and colleagues at Auburn, Indiana, and across the Southeast: thank you for your support.

Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank my family. They have supported the long process from undergrad to academic and still take the time to read my articles. Most of all I would like to thank my husband, Eric Wilka. Eric probably did not know what he was getting when he married an archaeologist who wanted to be an academic. He uprooted his life and moved to Alabama with me, far from both our families. He has been my sounding board, my shoulder to cry on, and my steady foundation. I could not have done this without his support and encouragement.

Introduction

The Fog of War

War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgement is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.

—Carl von Clausewitz, 1976 [1873]

In the early fall of 1540, Hernando de Soto and members of his expedition entered into the polity led by Tascalusa. The encounter between Tascalusa and Soto at the town of Atahachi in what is now Alabama provides rich details about town organization, political posturing, and even the clothing of Tascalusa and his retainers. After demanding porters and supplies (and being roundly rejected), Soto gave an order that he had used multiple times during his time as a conquistador; he had Tascalusa taken captive and began the process of moving farther down the Alabama River as they navigated toward the town of Mabila. Soto’s soldiers caused chaos across the countryside as they raided communities throughout the region. Garcilasso de la Vega (who wrote a secondary account that used a member of the Soto entrada as a source) recounts that Soto sent a soldier ahead to Mabila where he witnessed warriors stockpiling the houses with weapons and clearing grasses and other plant growth from around the exterior of the palisade (Clayton et al. 1993b:331–332). According to Luys Hernández de Biedma (an agent for the crown on the expedition), houses near the exterior of the palisade were demolished as well (Clayton et al. 1993a:233). Along with Vega and Biedma, the accounts of the Gentleman from Elvas (an anonymous writer) (Clayton et al. 1993a:98) and Rodrigo de Rangel (Soto’s secretary) (Clayton et al. 1993a:292) verify that houses were stocked with warriors and arrows, ready for a surprise attack against the Spanish army. The battle that ensued was fierce, resulting in significant loss of life, and it ended once the Spanish army set fire to the palisade and burned the town, resulting in the suffocation and burning of many of those still within the walls.

Against the backdrop of the exploration and conquest narratives of the Soto expedition, we catch glimpses of the political maneuvering, intrapolity violence, and warfare present in Mississippian period (AD 1000–1600) polities throughout the Southeast. Accounts of the Soto entrada are rife with descriptions of indigenous leaders shifting alliances to gain territories, using the Spaniards to fight against other polities, attacks between polities with the goal of destroying sacred temples and objects, intimidation tactics, and the weapons and defensive structures used by Mississippian peoples.

The violence documented by members of the Soto entrada in the Southeast were not isolated. They had their origins in histories of political consolidation, fragmentation, and reorganization throughout the Southeast; histories that may have had their start in the spread and subsequent collapse of the Mississippian world’s largest polity, Cahokia. With Cahokia’s beginnings around AD 1050, much of the midcontinent experienced a pax Cahokiana, a period of relative peace (Pauketat 2004) (see chapter 2). However, that pax was short-lived, as Cahokia and other Mississippian polities began constructing palisades and other defensive structures after AD 1150 (Krus 2016; Milner 1999). Life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Midwest and Southeast would have been dramatically different from prior centuries. As palisades were constructed around villages throughout the region, daily practices would have been reconfigured and renegotiated in a changing world where life outside of defensive walls was dangerous. Large polities in the region fragmented as political alliances grew contentious and groups splintered off to create new villages and alliances.

The Common Field site, a Mississippian period palisaded town located in east central Missouri along the banks of the Mississippi River, was settled and expanded during this period of fragmentation and reorganization associated with the prolonged exodus from Cahokia (see chapter 3). The Common Field site is one of very few Mississippian sites with unambiguous evidence that violent conflict took place at the terminus of the site’s habitation. Long thought to have been an unoccupied civic-ceremonial center (Adams et al. 1941; Chapman 1980), a major flooding event in 1979 revealed the presence of hundreds of burned structures, a palisade, nearly complete ceramic vessels, and articulated human remains across the site (Ferguson 1990; O’Brien 1996; O’Brien et al. 1982; Trader 1992). In the 700 years since Common Field burned, the stories and materials of the lives of the people who lived there have remained buried beneath the alluvial soils of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri.

Abraham Lincoln is thought to have lamented the awful arithmetic of war, referring to the number and scope of casualties that come about as a result of violent conflict. This sentiment highlights the realities of war as it is and was practiced on battlefields, in villages, and in peoples’ daily lives. Missing from the descriptions of violence and warfare in the Soto chronicles are the lives of the vast majority of people who were present in southeastern polities. Inside the palisade walls of Mabila, young warriors lay in wait to surprise attack the Spanish army, but where was everybody else? What were their lives like inside the palisade walls before the Spaniards appeared? What were they like after the battle of Mabila? Warfare is not only present in military institutions or on battlefields, not solely the purview of political leaders, and not only found in the realm of mythical heroes and warriors. None of these categories exist outside of the practices and experiences of people living in war zones. The consequences of war affect more than soldiers and elite leaders. The awful arithmetic is expansive and far-reaching.

War historian Carl von Clausewitz (1976 [1873]) recognized that war functioned within the fog of uncertainty; intelligence, skill, judgment, and creativity are necessary to operate in uncertain times and situations. Clausewitz focused on the decisions and actions of Western military leaders, but his broader points about uncertainty and creativity are apt for all situations associated with endemic violence and warfare. Anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom (1997) advocates telling a different kind of war story, one that highlights human experience, tragedy, and creativity during and after periods of warfare and uncertainty. Such an approach to the anthropology of violence and warfare explores the recursivity between daily (microscale) practices and the historical processes (macroscale) of change.

I tell a different kind of war story with regard to the spread of violence and the daily lives of people living at the Common Field site during the Mississippian period. This war story focuses on the creativity of daily life in the face of uncertainty and the new ways of being that emerge from processes of hybridity (Alt 2006, 2008, 2012, 2018; Bhabha 1994; Silliman 2013). Ultimately, this war story is about the effects of the awful arithmetic of political fragmentation, conflict, and destruction on the lives of ordinary people.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL FOGS AND WARFARE

Studying warfare from an anthropological archaeology position requires acknowledging and exposing our own disciplinary fogs of war. Anthropology has an uneasy history regarding the study of violence and warfare. The foundations of the discipline are rooted in violent colonial enterprises. Violence and warfare were central to the colonialist agendas that not only gave rise to the discipline of anthropology but also many of the subjects and categories that underlie anthropological research (e.g., modernity, civilization, primitivity) (Ferguson and Whitehead 1992; Gosden 2006; Pels 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). Imperialist and colonialist governments adopted the stance of viewing non-Western peoples as brutal savages to justify the violent subjugation of colonized nations and indigenous peoples (Ferguson 1992; Ferguson and Whitehead 1992; Keeley 1996; Taussig 1987). Many early anthropologists conducted their research at the behest of colonizing governments who sought ways to control subject populations (Asad 1991; Deloria 1969; Kuper 1996; Sibeud 2012). Ethnographies provided these governments with detailed information on the political and social organizations of peoples around the world. Frequently missing from these ethnographies is any mention of colonial violence perpetrated on people or the relationships between colonial subjugation and outbreaks of violence among/between peoples.

Despite the early emphasis on the brutality and primitiveness of non-Western peoples during colonial enterprises, Lawrence Keeley (1996) has argued that anthropologists salvaged the noble savage trope by arguing that tribal peoples practiced stylized, nonviolent, primitive warfare. This argument was possible because military historians downplay the effects of war, and many of the ethnographers writing about various groups arrived at their research sites after colonial governments had engaged in pacification campaigns. Such rewriting and ignoring of colonial histories also led to a pacification of the past in which many societies are seen as not having engaged in conflict of any real consequence or impact (Holm 2004; Keeley 1996; although contrast with Otterbein 2000, 2004). This pacification of the past has led many archaeologists to overlook or deny evidence of violence and warfare in the archaeological record (Keeley 1996).

Keeley’s (1996) suggestion that the past has been framed as mostly peaceful has been aided by anthropologists differentiating between types of warfare, most specifically the differences between what are referred to as primitive and civilized (also called modern or real) warfare. Turney-High (1971) and Clausewitz (1976 [1873]) distinguished between primitive and civilized warfare, a distinction that continues to be used today. The distinctions between primitive and civilized warfare emphasize the hierarchical, centralized nature of modern nation-states and the perceived lack of political complexity among kin-based societies. Keeley’s perceived pacification of the past is due in part to the definition of primitive warfare that downplays the scale and effects of prehistoric warfare. Otterbein (1999:797) argued that for early cultural relativism to take root, it had to be premised in the notion that non-Western people had to be perceived as gentle and benign, not savage and brutal.

These definitions separating primitive/ritual warfare from modern/real/civilized war have introduced uneasy assumptions, overlooked important aspects of warfare, and created distinctions where none may exist. The first problem is the assumption that the realms of religion and ritual are somehow separate from politics and economics (see Alt 2008; Baires 2017; Cobb and Giles 2009; Emerson 2007; Pauketat 2013a; Quilter 2002:167; Webster 2000: 72–73). Ritual and politics both have roles to play in the practices of violence and warfare. While the iconography of warfare may appear to depict highly ritualized practices, one cannot ignore the political, economic, and social effects of, for example, Moche captive taking and sacrifice (Quilter 2002) or the associations between the Maya ball-game and large-scale conflicts (Webster 2000). Mississippian period depictions of warriors, violent acts (e.g., decapitation, trophy-taking, captives), and weaponry have often been interpreted as depictions of supernatural or mythological beings who represented religious ideas about the triumph of life over death and/or served as charters for war-related practices (e.g., Brown 2007; Brown and Dye 2007; Lankford 2007; see chapter 2). However, those too cannot be divorced from their political, economic, and social implications (Alt 2008; Cobb and Giles 2009) as religion was entangled with social life in Mississippian societies (Baires 2017; Pauketat 2013a). Thus, many of the characteristics used to differentiate between primitive/ritual war and modern warfare are false and create illusory distinctions. The second problem with the differentiation between warfare types is that they tend to minimize or ignore the effects of violence within communities. The most common way to minimize the effects of warfare is to focus on death counts: the greater the death toll (as a proportion of the total population), the greater the effect (e.g., Pinker 2011). This leads researchers to downplay the consequences and effects of warfare in settings that may have low death counts while emphasizing the historically transformative nature of wars in modern contexts. Finally, these definitions position warfare as something outside of everyday life, something extraordinary that takes place on battlefields and involves specialized classes of warriors. However, warfare is far from separate from daily life as civilians produce foods for soldiers, get caught in the cross fire, lose loved ones, restructure their lives to deal with reduced mobility and access to goods, are uprooted and displaced, witness acts of violence, become captives and slaves, or integrate displaced peoples into their communities. In other words, war is a social experience. Far from being relegated to battlefields, warfare can infiltrate many aspects of daily life. As such, traditional anthropological and archaeological research on warfare that emphasizes typologizing warfare, the