Abstract
This paper employs concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and contemporary research on transnationalism to explore the complicated history of population movement, culture contact, and interaction that fueled the origins of Mississippian society in the greater Cahokia area and closely related socio-political developments in the Central Illinois River Valley (CIRV) of west-central Illinois. We offer a new take on Mississippian origins and the history of culture contact in the CIRV, arguing that interregional simultaneity and inter-group collaboration played an important part of the early processes of Mississippianization in the North American Midwest. By decentering Cahokia in our explanation of Mississippian origins in the greater Midwest, we argue for a long-term persistence of traditional pre-Mississippian practices in the CIRV region, beginning with the first documented engagement among Cahokians and Illinois Valley groups in the early eleventh century until the beginning of the thirteenth century AD.
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Notes
In this paper, we subscribe to a broad definition of the term culture contact that encompasses the many small- and large-scale encounters and cultural entanglements of different groups of people with each other in the past, while recognizing the baggage associated with the term “contact” (Silliman 2005) and not restricting its usage to capitalist or colonial contexts.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Sarah Baires, Melissa Baltus, and Jayur Mehta for the invitation to participate in this special issue. We acknowledge Dorothy Lamb, the Heinz and Fandel families, and the Hardwick and Robertson families for providing support and permission to conduct research at the Lamb, Fandel, and Lawrenz Gun Club sites, respectively. We also aknowledge support from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. We appreciate the thoughtful comments of the peer reviewers and editor Margaret Beck as well as feedback on earlier drafts by Amber VanDerwarker and Kaitlyn Brown. Lawrence Conrad, Alan Harn, and Bill Green provided advice at various stages of this research as well. Archaeological projects discussed in the text were supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 1062290 and 1262530; the University of California, Santa Barbara Academic Senate and Institute for Social, Economic, and Behavioral Research; and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Science Hirsch Fund.
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Wilson, G.D., Bardolph, D.N., Esarey, D. et al. Transregional Social Fields of the Early Mississippian Midcontinent. J Archaeol Method Theory 27, 90–110 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09440-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09440-y