Thule 38-41

38 Davide Domenici, Imma Valese
Valese acts as vice-director and coordinator of the fieldwork activities(2). The
project received financial and logistical support from the organizing
institutions, as well as from Italian Ministero degli Affari Esteri (Direzione
Generale per la Promozione del Sistema Paese – DGSP – Ufficio VI – Settore
Archeologia), Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Cahokia Mounds Museum
Society, Powell Archaeological Research Centre, Illinois State Museum
Research and Collections Center, National Geographic Society and Carisbo
Foundation.
Five fieldwork seasons have been carried out so far in the so-called Merrell Tract
II, corresponding to the north-central section of Cahokia’s West Plaza, one of the
four plazas that constituted the center of the Mississippian site. In line with the
wider purposes of the Cahokia Epicenter Project directed by John E. Kelly, our
research in the West Plaza area is aimed at clarifying its long occupational
sequence and, more specifically, at understanding its transformation in a mostly
open space with public buildings during the phases of Cahokia’s apogee. If past
studies on Cahokia’s public architecture mostly focused on on-mound buildings,
the Merrel Tract II – as well as the neighboring Merrell Tract and Tract 15B –
show evidence of various non-domestic wooden structures built at the plaza
level. A deeper understanding of the sequence, forms and patterns of use of West
Plaza’s public buildings could then provide new insights on the sociopolitical
organization of the ancient Mississippian city.
Cahokia: A Mississippian City
Cahokia, the earliest and largest settlement of Mississippian Culture, rose in
the so-called American Bottom, the alluvial plain formed by the continuous
swaying of the Mississippi river’s course below its confluence with the Missouri
(fig. 1)(3).
After centuries of scattered occupation by horticultural communities of the
Woodland Tradition, by the end of the ninth century the introduction of maize
led to the rise of a series of nucleated Emergent Mississippian villages (AD 850-
1050) (KELLY J.E. 1990b, 1992). According to John E. Kelly, the spatial
arrangement of these villages reflects new forms of community organization
and a rapid increase in sociopolitical complexity that eventually led to the
initial rise of Cahokia as a “mega village” or incipient “urban cluster” some
17-34 hectares in extent at the beginning of the eleventh century.