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Toward an understanding of Native American socio-pol complexity: It. Arch. researches at Cahokia 41
Cahokia was probably a multiethnic city, its population maybe increased by
foreign migrations and population resettlements (PAUKETAT 2003; ALT 2006a,
2006b), but an important part of Cahokia’s inhabitants were probably
ancestral to the Siouan linguistic family, most probably related with actual
Dhegiha Sioux Nations such as the Osage, Omaha, Ponca, Kansa, and Quapaw
(HALL R.H. 2004).
The shaping of a set of ideological and religious beliefs and practices that
sustained the development of a hierarchically ranked political system was
probably Cahokia’s most enduring legacy. Even after Cahokia’s demise and
abandonment at the end of 14 th century, its cultural achievements survived in
the form of objects, iconographies, and art styles that were adopted and
transformed by the many smaller, independent Mississippian polities that
thrived in the Southeast until the European invasion.
The Cahokia Project’s excavations in the Merrell Tract II of the
West Plaza
Due to its long occupational sequence, covering all Cahokia’s history from
Emergent Mississippian to Sand Prairie (AD 1275-1400) or even to Oneota
(AD 1400-1500), post-Mississippian times, the West Plaza is an ideal
location where to study such processes of reorganization and reshaping of
Cahokia’s public space (fig. 3). Our excavation areas were opened in the
north-central section of Cahokia’s West Plaza, in proximity to the western
margins of Tract 15B, an area where an extensive salvage excavation was
carried out in 1960 by W. Wittry (fig. 4). Our main purpose was to join the
two excavated areas and to locate the western sections of some public
buildings first exposed by Wittry’s team. Since at the time of our first
fieldwork season Wittry’s notes were still unpublished (they were later
published by T. Pauketat; see PAUKETAT T.R. 2013), the first activities of
our project included an analysis of Wittry’s fieldwork notes, maps, and
photos at the Research and Collection Center of the Illinois State Museum in
Springfield, IL, and their integration into the GIS of the West Plaza that we
were building in order to jointly manage all the available excavation data
(VALESE I. 2010/11).