This accessible and well-written travelogue boldly frames the hypothesis that late medieval Indigenous eastern North Americans embraced rain-bringing wind gods, originally conceived in Mesoamerica, along with maize agriculture. The spread of these beings and their cults was similar to the spread of the faiths in the Old World—Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam: they were conveyed by sages with their words, bundles, and visionary charisma early on, as much as by force in later colonialism. Author Timothy R. Pauketat has traveled and contemplated the places that witnessed the turn to these gods, from the Maya Lowlands through the Valley of Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico, the Sonoran Desert, the American Southwest, Caddo country, the Mississippi Valley, and the American Bottom. The introduction presents the case for environmental change in the late medieval era triggering an embrace of wind and rain gods.
The 12 chapters following the introduction are organized as a saga moving those gods northward, resonating with the historical adventure of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, which was an astonishing affirmation of the ability of strangers, especially magicians and healers, to survive long treks through the continent. That Indigenous Americans interacted with each other over great distances on metaphysical matters, as well as technical ones, should by now be obvious to archaeologists, and it is to some. Indigenous archaeologist Robert Hall always knew this, as Pauketat reports. That Indigenous people should respond to environmental change over distance intellectually as well as practically should also be obvious.
Pauketat strives to reveal the materiality of his arguments, tying the cults of wind/rain gods to round structures, feathered serpents, conch trumpets, and flower-shaped points, among other artifacts. Such empirical data are not perfectly aligned with the grand sweep of cultic movement over space and time, as he admits, and this point invites debate and discussion among specialists. Fugue-like, Pauketat keeps the focus of his interest on the larger proposition as he moves through space toward eastern North America. Each chapter is anchored into engaging physical description of the sites and artifacts, the ambient landscape, and the people.
The thesis will continue to be subject to debate. Yes, there were water shrines at Cahokia, not only the well-documented ones but recently advanced ones like the group north of Monk's Mound. Yes, the raptor deities, avatars of the feathered serpent storm gods, were also present at Cahokia. Yes, there are sacred monumental poles at Cahokia, like the great poles that allowed bird men to descend in Mesoamerica—not only in the late medieval period but also from much earlier. Indeed, a “sprawled” sacrificial victim at Mound 72 at Cahokia is probably a pole flyer descending with the bundled woman/man next to him.
The great methodological advance of diffusionism in the mid-twentieth-century archaeology of North America was not conceptually wrong but rather was a foundation for a new understanding, in which the movement of technologies was always accompanied by dialogue and coherent discussion of an animate, ambient world in which humans are agents of balance, not chaos. The material forms were bundles, as Robert Hall declared, as much as points or seeds. Pauketat discerns this truth moving toward a more perfect understanding.
A product of his years in conferences at the Santa Fe Institute, a major scientific think tank in the United States, this book affirms that archaeological science takes many forms, and the approach taken in Gods of Thunder is one of them.
