Thule 38-41 v2

Toward an understanding of Native American socio-pol complexity: It. Arch. researches at Cahokia 45
The most ancient evidences so far detected in our excavation area are some
late Emergent Mississippian house basins and pits, conforming clusters of
single-post houses (that is, houses whose walls were constituted by wooden
poles individually infixed along the margins of the sub-rectangular and
semisubterranean house basin) arranged around an open area or courtyard. At
least three or four of these Emergent Mississippian residential clusters with
central courtyards once stood in the Merrell Tract II-Tract 15B area of the
West Plaza (see PAUKETAT T.R. 2013: 70-73; fig. 4.17), one of them extending
in the northern part of our excavation area, where extramural late Emergent
Mississippian refuse pits, rich in discarded ceramic fragments, and botanical
remains, were excavated (F1016, F1017W; F1017E, F1080). The
preliminary botanical analysis of F1080 showed evidence of plant processing
and cooking activities, due to the high amount of recovered seeds of erect
knotweed (Polygonum erectum), maygrass (Phalaris carolinana), peppergrass
(Lepidium virginicum); moreover, the presence of tobacco seeds (Nicotiana
Rustica) and morning glory (Ipomoea sp.) may reflect the performance of
ritual activities related to the central courtyard (PARKER K.E. 2014). The
ongoing analyses of recovered materials will hopefully help in further refining
our chronological understanding and in distinguishing spatial modifications
that occurred during the two late Emergent Mississippian phases (Merrell and
Edelhart).
Interestingly, toward the end of the Emergent Mississippian occupation packs
of a clayish “blue fill” (F1160) seem to have been laid down in depressions in
order to obtain a leveled, horizontal surface. The specific purpose of these
activity is still unclear, but it suggests that the end of the Emergent
Mississippian period was already marked by important activities of landscape
modifications that started shaping the flat, open space that was going to be the
West Plaza, whose overall configuration is best attested in the subsequent
Lohmann phase.
The Lohmann phase (AD 1050-1100) is represented in our excavation area
only by negative evidence, that is, no single Lohmann features have been so far
detected. This absence is extremely significant, since in Tract 15B Wittry
exposed two different, sequentially built, Lohmann-phase circular compounds
or rotundas. F388 was a wall-trench structure with an approximate diameter
of 13 meters (only its southern side was identified). F238/389 was a bigger