Heritage collections, large datasets, and new analytical techniques frame the arguments and discussions in Archaeology and Ancient Religion in the American Midcontinent. This solid, timely, and well-researched volume is based on papers from a symposium held in honor of Thomas E. Emerson, retired director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, at the annual Midwest Archaeological Conference in 2014. A lynchpin of Emerson's research, and a major focus of the book, centers on the application of advanced analytical techniques to artifacts and assemblages from the Midcontinent. He and his colleagues have conducted groundbreaking research through decades of systematic cultural resource management investigations, coupled with reanalyses of older collections.
In the introduction, Koldehoff and Pauketat frame the volume's underlying assumption: religious practices may be analyzed, detected, and interpreted by investigating the roles played by objects, places, and substances. The overriding conceptual framework is based on the delineation of places and things through an archaeology of depositional context, physical properties, and ritual landscapes.
Taking the perspective that powerful objects shaped human events in the past, Koldehoff and Kenneth Farnsworth employ X-ray diffraction and a field portable spectrometer (PIMA) to analyze stone pipes dating from the Late Archaic through Middle Woodland periods. They document changes in the ritual significance of these earliest smoking pipes and demonstrate the increased ceremonial importance of stone pipes in the formulation and spread of Hopewell. One of their conclusions, contrary to long-held ideas, is that Middle Woodland platform pipes developed in Illinois and circulated to Ohio.
Based on a large database of tool caches from the American Bottom, Melissa Baltus argues that such deposits are not examples of utilitarian resources but, rather, represent religious offerings and the practice of gathering, which animates objects and spaces. Thus, the use of everyday objects demonstrates their participation in relationships with the animated world as part of private, ritual practices that created and perpetuated relationships with other-than-human beings.
Kathryn Parker and Mary Simon highlight the ancient uses of four “magic plants” found in the American Bottom: datura, morning glory, nightshade, and tobacco. Magic plants were integral to Late Woodland and Mississippian private and public rituals conducted by political and religious leaders who sought portals to the spirit world through drug-induced, altered states of reality.
In their review of Late Woodland and Mississippian mortuary practices, Kristin Hedman and Eve Hargrave summarize transformations in mortuary patterns and population history for the American Bottom. In light of these patterns they present new information and interpretations on Cahokia's Mound 72 interments based on recent bioarchaeological and isotopic analyses of skeletal remains.
Susan Alt summarizes Mississippian ritual architecture at the Emerald Acropolis, a Cahokian shrine center, which provides evidence of the genesis of an ancient religious movement. She argues that Mississippian culture began as a religion that in turn led to similar lifeways; thus building and landscape modifications from the Woodland-to-Mississippian transition resulted primarily from religious rather than political motivations.
Summarizing decades of research, John Richards and Thomas Zych discuss the perception of landscapes and mound construction by Late Woodland and Mississippian groups at Aztalan in southeast Wisconsin as a process of ethnogenesis. Mound building and ritual ceramic placement served as integrating social practices for a mixed population of local residents and immigrant Woodland and Mississippian (or Mississippianized) people.
Presenting evidence of ancient ritual landscapes in southwestern Illinois, Mark Wagner, Jonathan Remo, Kayeleigh Sharp, and Go Matsumoto highlight mound locations and the reuse of rock art sites as shrines founded by Woodland populations. These ritual locales were later enhanced and maintained by Mississippians as a process of linking the past and present together as an ongoing cycle of memory and meaning.
The volume closes with an exploration of cosmic alignments based on mound configurations that incorporated ideas about how the cosmos was structured. William Romain provides archaeoastronomical assessments of five key Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian mound sites. He concludes that people in the American Midcontinent connected with cosmic forces, entities, and places of importance for thousands of years to link with spiritual powers. These monumental earthworks articulated people with cosmic forces, entities, and places.
The book is an apposite testament to Emerson's outstanding contributions to eastern North American archaeology. The volume successfully advances our understanding of ancient religious practices and is a significant step toward the application of theoretical insights into ancient religion in the American Midcontinent. The contributors universally acknowledge that Emerson has encouraged them to utilize cutting-edge analytical techniques in studying large, diverse datasets, thus guiding their approach to an archaeology that demonstrates how empowered places and things may be investigated through depositional contexts, landscapes, and the physical properties of objects.
