Susan Alt's book addresses the question of Cahokian complexity by examining sites in the uplands east of the Mississippi River bottomland in Illinois, in particular the Grossmann site. The great site of Cahokia, and farmsteads elsewhere in the American Bottom, are well known to archaeologists. It was more recently discovered that a set of Cahokia-related communities lived on the loess-mantled upland till plains east of the river valley. Dubbed the Richland Complex, these dozen or more communities are puzzling in that they are contemporaneous with Cahokia and have many similarities with Cahokia in terms of material culture. Yet they also differ in sometimes striking ways both from Cahokia and the bottomland settlements and from each other. Who lived up there, how were they related to the bottomland communities, and what does that tell us about the organization of Cahokian society?
To address these questions, Alt begins (Chapter 2) with an overview of Cahokia and the other bottomland settlements. There is a huge body of literature about these settlements—dozens of sites and thousands of pages of reports—but Alt masterfully pares down this vast literature to a strikingly readable 19 pages. Although I was initially puzzled that she begins a book about an upland site with descriptions of bottomland sites, she was right to do so. Only by knowing about the architecture and artifacts at the bottomland sites can we appreciate how different the upland sites are.
A similarly judicious summary of the upland settlements—the Richland Complex—forms Chapter 3. Four sites receive close examination: Halliday, Hal Smith, Pfeffer, and Knoebel. Alt argues that significant fractions of these communities are immigrants: Halliday has immigrants from southeastern Missouri or northeastern Arkansas, while some of the people at Knoebel came from southwestern Indiana (and sites associated with the Yankeetown phase). These sites also reflect striking differences in flint raw materials, proportions of different kinds of tools, and types of buildings. Hal Smith and Pfeffer look relatively Cahokian; Knoebel and Halliday not so much.
But the oddest of the upland sites is Grossman, the subject of Chapter 4 (architecture) and Chapter 5 (artifacts). The plow zone was removed to expose nearly the entire site, revealing 113 structures. The fact that no structure has more than three building/rebuilding episodes suggests an occupation span of 45 years at most, sometime between AD 1075 and 1150. There is an unusually large number of nondomestic structures, including large and open halls, T-shaped and L-shaped buildings, sweat lodges, and a charnel house. The artifacts are mostly of sorts that are present in the bottomland settlements, but the proportions are flagrantly odd: lots of spindle whorls, quartz crystals, sanding or abrading tools, and an astonishing 9,214 hoe flakes. The best-known set of artifacts from Grossmann is a cache of 70 stone axe heads in a single pit, capped with a hypertrophic, 46-centimeter-long, nine-kilo monster axe. Grossmann is certainly not like a generic bottomland community, but what is it?
Alt tries to answer that question in the final chapter, and she hopes that the answer will help reveal not whether Cahokia was complex, but how it was complex—an important point to address. Her answer is not greatly specific (which is not to say I have a better suggestion). She says that the people at Grossman were deeply involved in ritual, and this ritual is important in the construction of not just their identity but the identity of the greater Cahokian community. What kind of rituals? They appear to have involved intentional destruction of various materials in fire. Alt cites world renewal/Green Corn ceremonies as a possibility. Green Corn ritual has been invoked by American Bottom archaeologists as the explanation for just about every sort of “ceremonial deposit” in the Cahokia region. Surely it cannot have been the only kind of ceremony in this society; there is too much variation between sites and between “ceremonial deposits” for everything to be attributed to just one cause.
Alt lucidly presents evidence that people at Grossmann and at other Richland Complex sites were frequently involved in ceremonies. What those ceremonies were, and exactly how they made Cahokia complex, awaits further explication. Meanwhile, she has done a fine job of making important information about the Richland Complex accessible in her compact and well-written volume, Cahokia's Complexities.
