If there is an afterlife situated somewhere in the heavens, surely Robert Hall must be looking down with satisfaction. As reflected in this fine offering on religion and the rise of Cahokia by Sarah Baires, Hall's archaeological emphasis on the centrality of religion to Indigenous experience—once viewed as somewhat marginal—has become increasingly mainstream. Whereas Hall relied strongly on Native American ethnographies and ethnohistories to inform his views, Baires melds those accounts with a rather eclectic theoretical perspective inspired by notions of animism and relational ontology. The result is a refreshing take on the role of new religious practices in the emergence of the great Mississippian center of Cahokia, in the American Bottom region of Illinois.
Landscapes occupy Baires's center stage in a framework known as “Place-Thought.” Here, the built environment was a continually unfolding social process that is both cause and consequence of culture change. In the relational perspective that Baires offers, the boundaries of natural and cultural worlds dissolve, and agency suffuses rocks, streams, and pottery. Even the ebb and flow of annual floods animate the Mississippian world, with water collaborating in a dialectical renewal and annulment of the landscape.
Baires's study focuses on ridge-top mortuary mounds: unusual, Toblerone-shaped earthworks unique to Cahokia and the surrounding region. Their constructions coincide with the posited Big Bang of Cahokia at approximately AD 1050, and they embody complex histories of human interments, exotic artifact caches, special-use buildings, and large posts. Baires proposes that the multistaged raising of these monuments both configured and transfigured the Cahokian landscape. Their placement helped to define the physical and phenomenological space of Greater Cahokia, their construction generated a community of participants and believers in a new order, and the apparently sacred activities that took place at various points in their biographies endowed them with living qualities. They were far more than static representations of power and wonder. The placement of the mounds and their associated burials underscore the influence of water in shaping the Cahokian world. The earthworks were consistently built in marshy locations, and the mortuary goods are distinguished in particular by thousands of marine shell beads, which Baires sees as the personification of water relationships that promised both life and death.
Baires also places great emphasis on the cosmic connotations of the Rattlesnake Causeway, a linear embankment of over 700 m connecting Cahokia's central mound-plaza complex and a major ridge-top mound. This possible “Pathway of Souls” oriented the entire site grid to 5° east of north, apparently mirroring the alignment of a major lunar standstill. Her important work on this feature will hopefully stimulate a reevaluation of large causeways at other sites in the midwestern and southeastern United States.
In some respects, this study is one piece of a larger puzzle. Whereas Baires approaches Cahokian religion through the built environment and related mortuary practices, there are a number of studies by others—not all of which are in agreement—delving into objects, iconography, specialized architecture, and other realms of materiality. We still await a major synthesis of those various threads, but the potential is exciting.
Baires pursues a different path toward an understanding of religion than has been the norm for Mississippian studies until recent years. I am sympathetic with her concern to distance Native American belief systems from Western understandings of religion. But I have to wonder whether there are also limits to what relational ontologies and animism can tell us about the spiritual world of Indigenous peoples—particularly if one's thesis is that there is a divide between pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment worldviews on the intermingling of religion with other practices and beliefs. In Bruno Latour's vision of the world where “we have never been modern,” even today, slippage between nature and culture, and between humans and nonhumans, is pervasive. In this light, perhaps major questions raised in comparative studies of belief systems might also be useful for inspiring an understanding of spiritual phenomena in more distant times and places. I would venture that eminent scholars of religion such as Elaine Pagels and Joel Robbins (whose views are not easily dismissed as post-Enlightenment) raise provocative issues equally relevant to the ascendance of Cahokia's new spiritual order and the emergence and spread of other religions: ongoing struggles between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the causes and consequences of great awakenings, and, perhaps most importantly, practices of conversion. In any event, thanks to the prompting of Baires and like-minded scholars, archaeologists should feel obligated to explore even more deeply the fundamental issues surrounding the materiality and practice of religion.
