Chapter 6 Fragile Cahokian and Chacoan Orders and Infrastructures
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Chapter 6 Fragile Cahokian and Chacoan Orders and Infrastructures Timothy R. Pauketat Two sprawling early urban or proto-urban complexes regimes help to produce early urban phenomena? How – Cahokia and Chaco – developed at about the same – in material-relational and historical terms – did they time far apart from each other in pre-Columbian North or did they not atract human populations? Did they America (Fig. 6.1). The construction of each was based become stratifed and how? What were the political and to a signifcant extent on maize agriculture supple- material histories of their demise? mented by other native plant foods, terrestrial game In my own answers to these questions here, I and, in the case of Cahokia, waterfowl, fsh, and other will focus on the properties and histories of cultural aquatic animals (for overviews, see Dalan et al. 2003; order and infrastructure at Cahokia and Chaco, par- Kantner 2004a; Lekson 2006; Noble 2004; Pauketat 2004; ticularly as entangled through maize agriculture, Pauketat & Alt 2015). Both were overbuilt complexes of ceramic production, monumental experience, and (politicized) religious activity and, in that form, likely water management. I will locate very litle of the his- acted as magnets for pilgrims and immigrants, shap- torical dynamism of the two complexes in communal, ing the histories of everyone and everything caught urban, ritual, or hierarchical structures per se, which up in their webs (Pauketat 2013; Van Dyke 2007). Yet have proven remarkably intractable to archaeologists neither survived the end of the Medieval Climate (in part because they are artifcial analytical constructs). Anomaly, about ad 9501250, with major monumental Doubtless, both Cahokia and Chaco were variably constructions and human habitations dating to circa communal, urban, ritual, and hierarchical – these are ad 10501250 for Cahokia and ad 8501130 for Chaco. dimensions of most human social experience – in ways As a consequence of their relatively short dura- that were closely tethered to their order and infrastruc- tions, many researchers have asked why these great ture as these developed through time. monumental complexes were organized in ways that Their fragility, in the end, was therefore depend- could be undone after less than 15 human generations. ent in some ways on their material qualities, on their Unfortunately, such ultimate questions have tended inclusive or exclusive and intensive or extensive pecu- to encourage overgeneralizations, drawing on abstract liarities, and on the extent to which their boundaries models of society and overlooking the very real, local, were either heavily incised on the landscape or, alterna- material and infrastructural underpinnings of each tively, permeable and susceptible to being transgressed. case. They typically characterize entire societies as In the following sections, I frst outline and compare either populous or sparsely setled, hierarchical or Cahokian and Chacoan social and material histories. communal, political or religious, and rational or ani- Then, I stress those immanent qualities of maize, mistic and then model the long-term implications of potery production, monumental construction, and said societies, all while requiring litle historical detail water management key to appreciating the fragility about the cases in question. of Cahokia and Chaco. Instead of such a model-heavy approach to ques- tions of fragility, I would argue that we should be Cahokian social and material history asking proximate, historical questions about specifc ( 950 to 1250) human, other-than-human, and material relationships. How did maize and other non-human agencies, maize- A millennium ago, a century after the beginning of the growing agriculturalists, and localized soil and climate Medieval Climate Anomaly (c. ad 950) and the coeval 89 Chapter 6 Figure 6.1. Location of the Greater Cahokia and Chaco regions (map by T. Pauketat). addition of maize felds to Midwestern landscapes, second largest of the precincts, East St. Louis, reveals a city of some 15,000 or more living souls covering clear neighbourhood paterning, among other things, 1520 sq. km Greater Cahokia coalesced along an with ofcial (political or religious) buildings in one extraordinary stretch of the Mississippi River (Fig. 6.2; area laid out on a grid patern amid numerous other Table 6.1). The process produced a cultural region of pole-and-thatch domiciles (Beenhauser & Pauketat some 30,000-plus sq. km (Pauketat & Alt 2015). At the 2018; Brennan 2018; Emerson et al. 2018). centre of it was a complex of three sprawling precincts Simultaneously, Cahokian emissaries or converts planned and built around ad 1050 at a scale never established shrine complexes and apparent support before imagined in pre-Columbian North America setlements up and down major waterways across (Fig. 6.3). Extensive new excavation data from the the American Midwest and Mid-South – 1000 river 90 Fragile Cahokian and Chacoan Orders and Infrastructures and overland km to the north at places such as Trem- 2002). Within an area of about 20 sq. km, each precinct pealeau, and 750 river-km to the south at places such (Cahokia, St. Louis, and East St. Louis) appears to have as Carson all as part of a short-lived but far-ung been built according to a slightly diferent orthogonal colonial moment during the second half of the elev- grid. A few buildings or monuments within each seem enth century (e.g., Delaney-Rivera 2004; Douglas 1976; to reference still other celestial, terrestrial, and substan- Emerson, Millhouse et al. 2008; Harn 1991; Johnson tial referents (Pauketat 2013). Besides water, prominent 1987; Pauketat, Boszhardt et al. 2015). By the twelfth referents included the moon and the night (Alt 2018b, century, Cahokia was a clear presence in the middle 2019; Baires 2017; Pauketat 2013; Pauketat et al. 2017; Mississippi River valley, with locals in all directions Romain 2015). Sarah Baires (2017) has argued that a disposed in some ways to adopt, acknowledge, or central causeway in the Cahokian precinct – part and confront the political, religious, cultural and military parcel of its founding design – was a virtual avenue challenges emanating from the American Botom to the dead (built of earth, through standing water), (Emerson 2007, 2012). while Susan Alt (2019) adds that this realm was both As a late eleventh and twelfth century city, Greater a nightly experience and an actual subterranean land- Cahokia was a ‘distanciated’ entity, with open water scape south and west of the city, superimposed by and in between the major precincts (see Amin & Thrift accessed via sinkholes built into the St. Louis precinct. Figure 6.2. The physiography of the Greater Cahokia region (map by T. Pauketat). 91 Chapter 6 Table 6.1. A comparison of Cahokian and Chacoan histories. References: Cahokia (Alt 2018; Benson et al. 2009; Emerson 1989, 1997a, b; Pauketat 1994; Pauketat and Alt 2017; Pauketat et al. 2015); Chaco (Lekson 2007; Lekson et al. 2006; Toll 2006; Van Dyke 2004; Vivian et al. 2006a, b; Wilshusen and Van Dyke 2006). Date Cahokia Chaco Climate 1340 1300 Depopulation 1260 Small isolated sites in defensive positions 1220 Reduced scale; reorientation; palisade construction Remodelled Great Kivas Burning and contraction of East St. Louis precinct Pueblo III reoccupation of Chaco Canyon 1180 Periodic droughts Periodic Upland farming district depopulation 1140 Depopulation and emigration Reduced scale; McElmo reorientation Ramey potery and carved fgurines; oversized posts 1100 Pueblo Bonito termination deposit Standardization of potery and craft production 1060 Long-distance outreach and shrine establishment Chaco Wash aggradation; water-control features Weter Massive constructions; immigration; theatrical mortuaries Regional expansion; maize and deer dietary focus 1020 Emerald shrine centre Massive constructions 980 Development of Terminal Late Woodland villages Great House construction pulses 940 Adoption of maize (and nixtalamization) Warmer 900 Chaco Wash channel degradation Pueblo Bonito room 33 burial 860 Earliest Great Houses and BMIII-PI pueblos; Mixed Late Woodland horticultural villages population concentration in northern San Juan There were fve ridge-top shaped ‘corporate- phenomena (moonlight and darkness) are among the elite’ mortuary mounds at the end of or around the most ‘immanent’ (and thereby religious) of a host of causeway. One of these was the well-known Mound celestial, terrestrial, and substantial referents (sensu 72, found to be the likely eleventh-century resting place Deleuze & Guatari 1987). They exist in multiple both of Cahokia’s founding men and women and of states and at multiple scales of experience. They have a series of mass human graves and artefact oferings ‘vibrant’ qualities that might afect people in spiritual (Emerson et al. 2016; Fowler et al. 1999). Given the more ways (Bennet 2010; Ingold 2007). As incorporated into than a dozen such mounds in the Greater Cahokia urban contexts via infrastructure, they have long-term region, which date as late as the early 1200s, it seems historical implications (Pauketat 2019). plausible that several leading families may be impli- In the Greater Cahokia region, lesser precincts cated in the social history of the city and its immediate and outlying religious shrines appear to have been environs (Baires 2017; Kelly 2005; Pauketat 2010). established in the early to mid-eleventh century to As Greater Cahokia’s design and monumen- position that city-under-construction at