It would be hard to think of a better exemplar of how American archaeologists are currently approaching the study of religion than Archaeology and ancient religion in the American Midcontinent. While focused on archaeology along the Mississippi River, particularly the region around Cahokia, the contributions to this edited volume vividly demonstrate the common themes and diversity of approaches that have come to characterise the archaeology of religion in the USA. This generalised approach combines, in varying degrees, issues of materiality, indigenous ontology, animism and symbolism with a number of more technical analyses of objects, features, sites and landscapes. Within this volume, particular attention is paid to the value of large datasets derived from cultural resource-management archaeology in elucidating the nature of religion in the Mississippi Valley.
In the introductory chapter, Brad Koldehoff and Timothy Pauketat lay out many of the theoretical and methodological issues that unite the volume. In terms of theory, they provide a concise review of the current literature, emphasising that archaeologists must stop viewing religion as strange behaviour that cannot be explained through rational actions. The major thrust of the chapter is to present a relational approach to religion, mostly derived from the work of Benjamin Alberti and others (Alberti et al. Reference Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall and Witmore2011). This approach takes seriously the ontologies of those who lived along the Mississippi River a millennium ago. Much of the theoretical heavy lifting is accomplished through the concept of animism, which asserts that the world of people, objects and places is populated by human and non-human animate beings interacting with each other. The subsequent chapters of the volume employ these theoretical approaches, with varying degrees of explicitness, to specific datasets.
Most of the chapters in the volume examine specific ways that religion facilitated the formation of large mound sites in the Mississippi Valley, with a particular focus on Cahokia. Each of these chapters examines objects, features, buildings or landscapes to reveal the ways that religion allowed for the coalescence of populations and the elevation of ritual or political leaders. In Chapter 3, Kathryn Parker and Mary Simon focus on a shift from widespread to a more elite-focused use of ritually significant plants, reviewing the archaeobotanical evidence of tobacco, datura, nightshade and morning glory. They argue that the elite at Cahokia legitimised their positions through the privileged use of these “magical plants” (p. 117). In Chapter 1, Brad Koldehoff and Kenneth Farnsworth examine how changes in the elaboration of tobacco pipes signify a shift from “simple shamanistic devices […to…] powerful symbols of a new religious/political movement known today as Hopewell” (p. 30). The key point in all of these chapters is that emergent elites increasingly controlled what had previously been widely available plants and broadly practised rituals.
Other chapters in the book take a more bottom-up perspective on coalescence. In Chapter 2, Melissa Baltus examines caches of utilitarian objects, interpreting them as bundled assemblages with great meaning for those who gathered and interred them. The making of caches, in this sense, brought together the diverse people who united to deposit them. This same theme can be seen in Chapter 4, where Kristin Hedman and Eve Hargrave examine the make-up of a burial population in Mound 72 at Cahokia using strontium analysis. Mound 72 has long been a focus of research because of the discovery of several individuals seemingly buried with great wealth and numerous sacrificed retainers. Where previous researchers have argued that the sacrificial victims may have been immigrants or war captives, Hedman and Hargrave show that they are a mixture of local and non-local people. This, in turn, may demonstrate that local and non-local immigrants were, perhaps, more integrated into the Cahokian order than previously believed.
Chapters 5, 6 and 8 focus on site-level analyses. In Chapter 5, Susan Alt reports on excavations at Emerald Acropolis, a shrine centre that she argues demonstrates that “becoming Mississippian meant first and foremost adopting a new religion, and this new religion then required a new way of living and being in the world” (p. 208). In Chapter 6, John Richards and Thomas Zych examine the religious structures and practices at Aztalan, a Mississippian outlier in southern Wisconsin. Through analyses of the layout of the mounds and other smaller finds, they argue that the site fostered a hybrid of Cahokian and local ritual practices. William Romain (Chapter 8) argues that there is a long-term, durable pattern of laying out mound sites around astronomical phenomena in the eastern part of the USA. Romain argues that this tradition has been ubiquitous at major mound sites for at least the last five millennia. At a landscape level of analysis, Wagner et al. (Chapter 7) examine the effects of flooding on natural features in southern Illinois. They argue that a natural bluff prominent enough to be visible above the Mississippi floodwaters would have been considered a mound by the ancient inhabitants of the region. Based on rock art found on the bluff, they argue that this natural mound was given the same symbolic significance in terms of Mississippian cosmology as human-made mounds, and was a focal point of the local ritual landscape.
For all of the theoretical sophistication and technical prowess presented in the volume, Archaeology and ancient religion in the American Midcontinent serves best as a potent demonstration that studying ancient religion requires an awareness of the possible expressions of religious phenomena and an attention to specific contextual evidence. The eight case studies are successful because they stay focused not on the broader theoretical perspectives, but rather because they remain grounded in the specific materials, sites and landscapes that make up the Mississippian archaeological record.
