The impact of the Native American city of Cahokia was felt throughout the greater US Midwest and Mid-South, visible in hybrid pottery forms, projectile point styles, foodways, house shape and size, large-scale maize agriculture, and village organization—not to mention novel political and religious ideologies identified at sites located up and down the Mississippi River system. Christina Friberg's new book presents a robust dataset from the twelfth-century village at the Audrey site in the Lower Illinois River Valley (LIRV), located about 80 km northeast of the city of Cahokia, and she investigates how and why Cahokian traits are seen at sites outside of the American Bottom. Friberg builds on ideas such as history and tradition making as well as Mississippianization (or the spread of Cahokian-Mississippian lifeways beyond Cahokia) to structure her argument that “tradition is identity in practice,” (p. 42) whereby identities are shaped through the movement of people, things, and ideologies.

Friberg's perspective on tradition making speaks importantly to the social dynamics of how communities of people participate in and adopt new ways of life. This idea has long been at the forefront of Cahokian archaeology, built on the well-established understanding of Cahokia's far-flung economic, social, and political influence along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. As such, Friberg's approach shares many similarities with previous perspectives like those focused on relationships between the American Bottom and the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) as well as with sites such as Trempealeau in Wisconsin, Emerald in southern Illinois, and sites in the Richland Complex northeast of Cahokia. Friberg differentiates her book from these approaches through a focus on the somewhat underexamined sites of the LIRV—a benefit to cultural contact literature in the Cahokian Mississippian world. Her contribution in this book relies heavily on established theories rather than on her own unique theoretical perspective—something she has recently done in her journal article “Cosmic Negotiations: Cahokian Religion and Ramey Incised Pottery in the Northern Hinterland” (Southeastern Archaeology, 2018), through a detailed examination of variation in Ramey Incised vessel motifs as a proxy for understanding if and how LIRV inhabitants chose to participate in Cahokia's cosmological reframing of the world, in which Cahokia was an epicenter of ritual and politics. However, Friberg utilizes the data in this book well to emphasize the recursive relationship between LIRV inhabitants and Cahokia, arguing that the formation of these traditions (in the form of pottery manufacture and style, household construction techniques, and foodways, for example) happens through the negotiation of existing identities and histories alongside new ones.

Using the Audrey site data along with several comparative datasets from the surrounding region, Friberg demonstrates how the presence of Cahokia impacted and shaped daily life in the LIRV. Chapters 1 and 2 provide necessary contextual data for the regions in question (the American Bottom and the LIRV), familiarizing the reader with the history of investigations in these areas and highlighting the theoretical perspectives built from them. From a cultural-historical approach, these chapters lay out regional chronologies, general trends seen in the archaeological record, and the theoretical frameworks utilized to unpack those trends. These chapters are useful for readers new to archaeology in the American Bottom and greater Midwest, but they oversimplify, in some respects, the dynamics and complexity of archaeological sites in this region. Friberg's data are centrally important to understanding the social dynamics of Cahokia-hinterland relations fully, and these opening chapters would benefit from discussing theoretical perspectives on urbanism and complexity that frame Cahokia and the surrounding sites/regions as parts of a cosmopolitan expansive urban center on par with those seen in Mesoamerica and South America. Doing so would reiterate the importance of Friberg's work in broader conversations on archaeologies of urbanism rather than limiting it to regional context alone.

The subsequent chapters (Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6) contain particularly useful data on excavated sites from the CIRV and LIRV. From architectural styles and site organization to data on artifacts, these chapters include detailed and comparative figures covering ceramic and lithic artifact types, architectural components and site layouts, as well as radiocarbon dates from the Audrey site. One of the ways Friberg examines tradition and identity making is through a close analysis of Audrey pottery. She concludes that Audrey's inhabitants, as a way to renegotiate social identities, adopted American Bottom pottery traditions such as the Ramey Incised vessel and its attendant iconography while maintaining localized Woodland-era pottery traditions related to foodways. These data are then compared to excavated sites from the northern hinterlands and the Apple River Valley of Illinois as well as sites in the area of the American Bottom dubbed “Greater Cahokia” to examine region-wide trends in pottery production. The reporting on these data alone makes this book a worthwhile addition to any Midwestern archaeologist's library. The brief concluding chapter synthesizes the data within the context of “making Mississippian”—or rather, how and why twelfth-century Audrey villagers adopted new Cahokian practices while maintaining some of their own, all while contributing to the greater Cahokia phenomenon.

Factoring in distance from Cahokia and thinking through the processes of how ideas and traditions move, Friberg emphasizes that there is not just one simple solution to her questions of interaction and identity formation, but rather that multiple factors must be considered when examining the processes of how and when communities choose to participate in something new. The challenges of adapting to new lifeways while maintaining local traditions is something that has reverberations in other world areas in the past, as well as in our contemporary world as communities continue to move across political and social boundaries. Christina Friberg provides here robust datasets with which to explore the motivations for these cultural transformations in the Mississippian world of the Lower Illinois River Valley.