Figure 14.1. Broken pots on a burned house floor at the Crable site in the central Illinois River valley. IncineFated Villages • I tile Nort - Greg D. Wilson It is summer in the central Illinois River valley in above the valley floor and in places are cut into the year 1238 CE. A small, bluff-top village is under sharp ridges by the valleys of small streams draining attack by an overwhelming force gathered from the adjacent country. allied enemy villages. Archers man the palisade From their bluff-top redoubts, villagers would wall, and men, women, and children scramble in all have been able to keep watch over great swathes of directions as the attackers' first flaming arrows hit the valley floor, hindering their enemies' attempts to the thatched roofs of the villagers' homes. launch surprise offensives. And any assault force Life in this valley during the 1200s meant living approaching a fortified town from the valley below with the threat of assault always just over the hori­ would have faced a precarious charge up a steep zon. The archaeological discovery of burned villages incline while dodging volleys of arrows fired by all over the region tells us that organized attacks archers positioned strategically along wooden pal­ were real concerns. At the peak of hostilities, a vil­ isade walls. Yet despite the high risks associated lage might have suffered devastating assaults several with attack, many offensives succeeded. At least five times in a generation. Many of the valley's inhabi­ and perhaps as many as ten fortified Mississippian tants must have lost friends or family members to settlements in the central Illinois River valley ended the violence. The looming threat of attack appears in flames, apparently having been set ablaze during to have affected everything from chiefly leaders' large-scale, direct assaults or after sudden, strategic political relationships with Cahokians to the way abandonments. commoners fished, farmed, and hunted. For archaeologists, these catastrophic burnings The central Illinois River valley is a 130-mile created a rare "Pompeii-like" snapshot of ancient segment of the Illinois River running from the mod­ life in the region, a well-preserved picture of settle­ ern town of Meredosia, in Morgan County, Illinois, ments where fleeing residents left whole pots, stone northeastward to Hennepin, in Putnam County. tools, and ritual objects in place on dwelling floors. Mississippianized people lived in the valley from Much about the hostilities that produced such a around llOO CE until about 1450, when the whole record of devastation remains a mystery. The story region was abandoned. During the decades of vio­ of what we do know begins just before violence lence that started around 1200, Mississippians in escalated in the region. this area built most of their villages on defensible In the centuries before Cahokia and the appear­ bluff crests on the western side of the valley. There, ance of the first Mississippians in the central Illinois the bluffs usually rise well over a hundred feet River valley, at least two Late Woodland groups 99 I Ll 1~01'> .lrrat~f D dt!ml L ' ' 0 Orendor tY LtC W ('loper • \-z Dro~son Mourds Cr br • ~ c=7 awrerz. "-­ Jn Cub Star Br JQE• /2 • Meredos,a r '- r Figure 14.2. Selected Mississippian archaeological sites in the central Illinois River valley lived there, making different styles of pottery and arrow or spear points embedded in the bones. But erecting their villages in different kinds of places. no valley residents of this era fortified their settle­ Increasingly at the time, groups throughout the ments, so hostilities must have been small-scale American midcontinent were becoming more perma­ and relatively rare. nently settled, staking claims to their own pieces of In the mid-lOOOs, the founding and expansion the landscape and investing more heavily in growing of Cahokia more than a hundred river miles to seed crops. Violence must have erupted among them the south sent political and religious shock waves occasionally, for archaeologists sometimes find through tribal societies in the Midwest, South, and graves holding group burials and skeletons with Great Plains. People of the central Illinois River I 00 Greg D. W ilson Figure 14.3. Burned cross-shaped temple at the Eveland site. valley almost immediately began emulating The Cahokia-style human sacrifice and the Cahokian ways of making and decorating pots well-developed temple and mortuary complex at and building houses. Eveland and Dickson Mounds imply that Cahokian A second pulse of Cahokian influence and religion played an important part in the Mississip­ emulation began around llOO, corresponding to pianization of the central Illinois River valley in the the beginning of Cahokia's "classic" period. early llOOs. People of the valley also emulated Mississippianized residents of the central Illinois Cahokian material culture more pervasively at this Valley now erected Cahokia-style temples in at least time. Although traces of Woodland-style living per­ two small ceremonial sites. The better understood sisted, visitors to any settlement in the central val­ of these is Eveland, where excavators uncovered ley would have met people living in Cahokia-style seven Mississippian structures. Four of the struc­ wall-trench houses, cooking and storing food in tures were Cahokia-style temples-a cross-shaped Cahokia-style pots, and hunting with Cahokia-style building built over an earlier rectangular one, a arrowheads. Perhaps by adopting a relatively uni­ large T-shaped building, and a circular sweat lodge. form array of Cahokian material forms, groups in The Eveland site stood adjacent to the other cere­ the region downplayed their long-standing ethnic monial site, Dickson Mounds mortuary complex, divisions. where 250 people were interred during the early In any event, this period of Cahokian influence llOOs. Among the burials were four decapitated and emulation lasted no more than fifty years before adult men, buried together with pottery vessels people dramatically scaled back their connections to positioned in place of their heads. Their ritual exe­ Cahokia or even severed them entirely Marking this cution and burial were nearly identical to an earlier transition was the planned and complete abandon­ sacrificial event at Cahokia, in which four adult ment of the Eveland site: all ritual items were removed men whose heads and hands had been severed were from its temples, and its buildings were burned. The collectively buried under the ridge-top Mound 72. deliberate termination of Eveland corresponded Incinerated Villages in the North I 0 I Jar ~~ j Plate" Jar" ' 0 0 •C)Metate 0 • Pipe Figure 14.4. Artifacts left on N a burned house floor at the Orendorf site, including A pottery vessels used for 0 2 3 4 cooking, storage, and serving; ---==::::i.--.1::::== Meters a large sandstone metate, or (Architecture Scale) 0 4 corn-grinding stone; and two -=-:!Centimeters stone tobacco pipes. (Artifact Scale) roughly to a series of burning events at Cahokia­ affiliated Mississippian sites in the lower Illinois River valley and in Cahokia's East St. Louis precinct. Political turmoil was roiling the greater Cahokia area and quickly spilled over into neighboring regions. The result was village-against-village violence. Following the ritual burning of Eveland in the mid-llOOs, people in the central valley began for the first time to establish compact villages set on defensible bluff edges and protected by wooden palisades. By 1200, much of the regional populace had settled into and around such villages. The best understood of them is the Orendorf site. From this Figure 14.5. Aerial view of Star Bridges, a burned bluff-top perch, residents of five sequentially occu­ Mississippian village in the central Illinois River valley pied villages, spanning the final century of the dating to the 1200s. The striations visible in this photo Woodland era through the Mississippian period, and figure 14.6 are plow furrows. looked down over the western valley floor. Orendorf's last manifestation consisted of a twelve­ acre palisaded settlement with an estimated four spaced at intervals corresponding to the effective hundred to five hundred inhabitants. This village range of a bow and arrow. underwent two episodes of expansion; each time, Finally, around 1250, this final Orendorf village the palisade wall was rebuilt. Designed for military burned to the ground. Residents left rapidly and purposes, the wall featured bastions regularly without planning, abandoning whole pots, valuable I 02 Greg D. Wilson Figure 14.6. Aerial view of Buckeye Bend, a burned Mississippian village in the centrallllinois River valley dating to the 1200s. tools, and ritual paraphernalia intact where they sat Chronic warfare also obstructed the daily food on house floors. They even left behind the body of quest. Community members had to reorganize their a recently deceased man, unburied in a burned diet in order to minimize the risk of attack while house. And Orendorf was not alone; widespread fishing, farming, and hunting. Archaeological stud­ burning razed other villages in the central valley in ies of Mississippian foodways are revealing that the late 1200s. Aerial photographs of two such community members in the central Illinois Valley sites-Buckeye Bend and Star Bridges-reveal rows coped by concentrating on growing maize at the of densely packed, burned houses arranged around expense of pursuits such as gathering wild plants rectangular central plazas. The thoroughness of the and fishing, which required frequent or lengthy burning and the abandonment of intact domestic trips away from home. The result of these violence­ possessions declare the most likely cause to have induced changes was a narrower, less nutritious diet been warfare. that was more vulnerable to shortfalls. Certainly, the palisades surrounding villages in Of course the most obvious cost of living with the 1200s were designed to keep unwanted persons chronic warfare-whether one was victim or out.