4
Water and Shells in Bodies and Pots

Mississippian Rhizome, Cahokian Poiesis

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Timothy R. Pauketat and Susan M. Alt

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead, uncertain source

Humans arose . . . as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway.

—Stephen Jay Gould, “The Evolution of Life on the Earth” Scientific American

Understanding human history is about locating the power to change the world. Before the 2000s, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists working from anthropocentric points of view located that power as human intentionality, much as does Mead, above. She was not necessarily wrong, but such strict anthropocentrism has faded as considerations of corporeality and materiality have shown that the human mind is not a self-contained entity and that agency is not solely a human attribute (Dobres 2000; Latour 1993; Malafouris 2013; Meskell 2004; Mills and Walker 2008).

More recently, post-humanist, ontological perspectives have led us to the conclusion that ultimately, the power to alter webs of relationships derives not from people (or even from other organisms, places, things, or other relational “nodes”) but from the relations themselves. Relations are those physical properties, experiential qualities, and other flows or movements of substances, materials, and phenomena that become attached to, entangled, or associated with others and, in the process, define not only people but other organisms, things, places, and the like (Ingold 2007). Indeed, entire relational fields—worlds—are always in motion and subject to reconfigurations. Some reconfigurations seem radical, as in small groups of committed citizens changing the world. Others seem less radical, as noted by Gould, above, and appear contingent on thousands of linked events. Should we give precedence to one over the other when seeking to understand human history? We think not.

The two approaches to human history, Mead’s and Gould’s, are, in fact, compatible using a relational perspective. To show how, we employ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of “rhizome” and “territorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). We apply these paired concepts to the remarkable case of Mississippian culture (figure 4.1), which seemingly appeared and spread across a large portion of continental North America starting a thousand years ago. We focus on regions around greater Cahokia (Pauketat 2004) and begin by returning to the original taxonomic definition of Mississippian as a “way of life” that involved people who made shell-tempered pottery, grew maize crops in the bottomlands of major rivers, and built flat-topped earthen mounds (Griffin 1952, 1967). There was something intuitively right about that definition, though since the 1970s it has been relegated to a historical footnote by researchers seeking the illusory organizations or mental templates that they believe structured “Mississippian societies” (as reviewed by Blitz 2010). As opposed to such reconstructions, our methodology will be genealogical. We will trace the movements and qualities of materials and infer relations (à la Baires 2016; Pauketat and Alt 2005; Weismantel and Meskell 2014), ranging from construction loads in pyramids, to sweating bodies in temples, to maize in pots, to the temper of those pots. We end up immersed in water, with implications for understanding the agency of substances and things and the genesis of Cahokia and other Mississippian places.

Figure 4.1. Map showing locations of cultural complexes noted in text. Original by Timothy R. Pauketat.

The result of our review is a blend of Meade’s inspiring dictum on small groups of “committed citizens” and Gould’s thoughts on “thousands of linked events.” Both are necessary to understand widespread cultural developments and radical historical change. Yes, the historical changes with which we are concerned might be pinned in some ways on the rapid rise of an American Indian city, Cahokia, along the Mississippi River (Pauketat, Alt et al. 2015). However, our current interrogation turns on the deeper undercurrents of such sweeping moves. We conclude that the pervasive changes altering the flow of life—the Mississippianization of mid-continental and southeastern North Americans—were rhizomatic and afforded a more dramatic territorialization of relations once coordinated by people and cosmic forces at a higher scale. Whether some or all people intended at the beginning for this to happen seems both unlikely and beside the point.

Being, Bundling, and Bounding

Certainly, as cultural and biological beings, people subsist, make a living, change history, inscribe or incorporate memories, craft meanings, and construct landscapes that constrain their experience (e.g., Costin and Wright 1998; Dobres 2000; Dobres and Robb 2000; Tilley 2004; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). In addition, people and other sentient beings engage many supposedly inanimate things, substances, materials, places, and phenomena as if they were animate, at least in moments. The reasons would seem to lie in the fact that such things always mediate social relations to some degree or in some moments, contingent on contexts and characteristics (Bennett 2010).

They also mediate nonhuman relations between and among inorganic and organic substances, materials, and phenomena of all kinds. For instance, the minerals in a would-be rock might crystalize to create a distinct entity owing to the reactions between or mediations of elements and chemicals. Similarly, a mountain peak mediates the sky’s moist air to produce clouds and, later, rain that then erodes the slope and reshapes the peak. Water, in turn, becomes clouds, lakes, rivers, springs, rain, and snow as it is isolated in relation to other materials and phenomena. Water, of course, also allows a plant to grow and flower, the scent and color of which are bundled together such that they enchant the bee and mediate its flight and ultimately the success of both its colony and the flowering plant. Like the bees, all organisms grow and move because of the substantial and atmospheric affects of their worlds, but in so doing they mediate and reshape the relational configurations of their affective or social fields. In the process, beehives and other places come into existence through physical co-associations and entanglements of beings and matter, which may be replaced or displaced through time.

Foregrounding relations in this way led Timothy Ingold (2000, 2007) to reject Bruno Latour’s (1993) notion of network, which for Ingold implied that agents (or actants) exist first. Instead, Ingold adapted a Deleuzian notion of rhizome or, as he calls it, “meshwork.” The rhizome is an entangled non-hierarchical mass of relations that cannot be reduced to a singular, static entity since the relations are always in a state of becoming something (aka poiesis). When the mass is bounded in some way, which is to say “territorialized,” the becoming process produces a recognizable entity, a being, place, or thing.

Rhizomes, meshes, and meshworks connote more organic relational connections that emphasize the overall fabric of relations while deemphasizing the entanglements (aka knots, nodes, bundles, assemblages, and so on) that hold the strands of a mesh in place. Indeed, the rhizome—technically a root system that produces nodes (from which, in turn, emerge more roots)—can be more or less bounded or circumscribed across space or through time (see also Pauketat 2013c). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call this process “territorialization,” and it is the opposite of rhizomatization. Each tangle of rhizomatic roots and nodes, for instance, might constitute a relational field that, when territorialized, loses its open edges and potential to grow.

Territorializations can appear, at various points or thresholds, as moments of metamorphosis or poiesis, when one field of relations moves from one state of being or relating into another. The configuration of the resulting mass has properties (shape, density, durability, disposition, directionality, and the like) vis-à-vis the wider field of relations that then mediate the rate and scale of historical changes (Pauketat 2013b). Mediation here is virtually synonymous with agency, or the causal power to create and alter fields of relations. It is that which affords outcomes.

Such mediations are not abstract but affective and experiential. They have power—palpable agentic or affordant qualities. In some sense they might be proactive, confronting people and organisms with their very existence. They do this in part through the senses of the beings affected. For instance, fire transmogrifies that which is burned with obvious sensorial affects and potential historical effects. Features or properties of atmospheres or landscapes induce certain sensorial reactions or relations specifically in or with other materials, phenomena, and substances. These other materials, phenomena, and substances, in turn, along with organisms, have affects of their own. Animals, for instance, have affective qualities that might include odor, appearance, permeability, durability (lifespan), perceptive ability, and biomechanical or habitual modes of movement, among other things. Water from the sky or on the land moves on its own (with the help of gravity) and mixes with earth to produce mud, which, when mixed with temper and molded by human hands, can be hardened by fire to produce ceramic objects that play critical roles for people. Of course, organisms develop, move, reproduce, and mutate during their lifetimes, only then to die and decompose. Consider the mollusk, a locomotive being that lives in the mud and water and produces a durable shell as it develops by consuming microorganisms. Or consider the maize plant, which draws water and nutrients from the earth and grows skyward with the aid of the sun, rain, and human beings to finally produce nourishing grain. The people who would come to be called Mississippians traveled daily between water bodies and agricultural plots, relying intimately on both mollusks and maize for their energy and growth.

Descendants of Mississippians and other variably Mississippianized Woodland and Prairie-Plains people (see DeMallie 2001) actually named and discussed the animating power or life force that could inhabit or imbue people, organisms, places, things, and more, hence affirming the potential vitality of the web of life (Dorsey 1894; Hallowell 1960; Hewitt 1902; Radin 1914). They called it Wakanda, Orenda, Waruksti, or Manitou, depending on their cultural background. Especially revered—full of Wakanda, Orenda, Waruksti, or Manitou—were materials, substances, and phenomena with palpable power, energies, or bioactive properties. These included the sun, moon, stars, wind, water, earth, lightning, fire, smoke, corn, and tobacco. For example, the stars might be understood as ancestral beings that moved across or fell from the night sky (Hall 1997; Lankford 2007). Various objects, buildings, wooden posts, or other spaces might be ensouled or spiritually occupied from time to time. Sacred bundles—wrapped packages of “medicine” (which is to say, potentially animate and powerful things)—were recognized as social persons or even oracles with their own needs and perceptions that required the attentions of and consultations by human keepers and priests (Howard 1981; Murie 1981; Skinner 1913; Wissler 1912; Zedeño 2008).

As elaborated elsewhere, medicine bundles are especially good examples of how the animating life force of Native worlds was fluid, containable, and transferable (Pauketat 2013b). As concentrations, bundles were movements or transferences of the holy forces that in many cases were believed themselves to be living beings or persons. The otherwise dispersed life force(s) they contained or concentrated might be passed from the spirit realm to the human realm, concentrated or dispersed across the cosmos, and passed from human being to human being. Historically, these were carefully curated assemblages of powerful, elemental, and mnemonic objects or substances wrapped in animal skins or textiles, with each item—ranging from bones and stones to sacred tobacco and smoking pipes—articulating a set of larger personal, community, or tribal relations. The act of bundling, often prompted by dreams or visions of holy entities, was a concentration and hence an alteration of any relational field. It changed, rearranged, or reconfigured the potential relationships and mediators of such fields. The act of opening a bundle, especially particularly powerful community or tribal bundles, happened only as part of pre-planned ceremonial occasions—a transference of supernatural power through the bundled objects to the people. Bundle powers could be transferred from a person or people to another person (an apprentice) or people, if care was taken and preparations made to ensure no loss of power in the process.

Of course, medicine bundles are not the only kind of bundles that matter in our present considerations. We might think of any assemblage or entanglement of animate, agentic, or powerful people, places, things, substances, materials, or phenomena as a metaphorical bundle. Indeed, all territorializations of relations—assemblages of things, intersecting movements or entanglements in space, and recollections and embodiments of knowledge, history, or feelings—are bundles in this sense because people, places, things, substances, and phenomena always mediate relations to some degree. This is not to say that bundles were similarly and continuously animate or that they uniformly possessed agency. In fact, animacy, agency, or other mediating powers were clearly not fixed attributes of any one type of thing, kind of location, or even sort of human being. Moreover, agency was not the same thing as personhood, the latter a situational characteristic of particular assemblages or bundles of animate or affordant qualities that mediated social identity. The weaker or more elemental the mediation, as in the routine human engagements with earth or water, the more widely dispersed and impersonal (but pervasive) was the agency. The tighter or more densely and thickly entangled the mediations, as in the case of social persons such as a community leader or a medicine bundle, the more bounded and concentrated was the agency.

The Raw Materials of Mississippianization

The point of such relational thinking is to contextualize the animacy and agency of discrete entities in their wider relational webs. Neither things nor people have agency by themselves. This may seem especially obvious with maize, shell-tempered pots, mounds, and sweat baths, none of which are possible without people. In fact, for some archaeologists, maize agriculture, mound building, sweating, or shell temper were not causal at all but are thought to have been the consequences of dietary, societal, or technological developments. These and other archaeologists assume that such things were the epiphenomenon of Mississippian societal transformations. Earthen pyramids, for instance, were said to passively “correlate” with hierarchical organizations (Peebles and Kus 1977). Likewise, the adoption and spread of maize was said to be a result of Mississippianism (Fritz 1992).

Seemingly, for such archaeologists the specificities of the assemblages of material culture mattered less than the Mississippian societies that assembled and distributed them far and wide (cf. Jennings 2010). However, a closer genealogical consideration of the distribution of maize, shell-tempered pots, and the practices of sweating and mound building suggests a more active and enmeshed role in the Mississippianization of people (see also Baires 2016). Maize, shell, sweat, and mud, mediated by water and fire, are the objects and substances that entangled and territorialized people.

To begin that genealogical consideration, we turn to the pre-Mississippian and early Mississippian world, centered on Cahokia, from about AD 900 to 1100. In particular, we seek to trace the potential relations among water, mollusks, corn, mud, and fire to judge how they mediated and territorialized social relations. Of the organisms (mollusks, corn plants, people), substances (water, mud), and phenomena (fire) to be considered here, all may have been in some sense responsible for the Cahokian poiesis, since all possessed some kind of power to mediate relations. That is, the swirl of affective qualities surrounding water, mollusks, corn, and mud, transmogrified by fire, gathered, reconfigured, and territorialized humanity to produce the Mississippians. To explain, let us work our way backward, beginning with the radical social transformation, also known as Cahokia’s “Big Bang” at ca. AD 1050 ± 25, when the city of Cahokia was rebuilt and monumental earthen mounds, maize agriculture, pottery production, and other major developments appeared across the middle of the Mississippi River basin.

Earth, Fire, Vapors, and Sweat

By the time the Medieval Warm period (AD 900–1300) had drawn to a close, the majority of the hundreds of thousands of so-called Mississippian people living in the American Midwest and Southeast, from the Carolina Piedmont into the Mississippi valley (see figure 4.1), tended agricultural fields of maize (along with squash, sunflowers, and local grasses). They cooked maize and other foods in homemade pottery jars tempered with crushed mussel shell. Some significant number of these people, in turn, at some point in their lives labored to construct flat-topped earthen pyramids. The highest concentration and largest of these mounds were built at Cahokia starting around AD 1050.

More than just an aggregation of earthen monuments populated by 10,000 or more people, early Cahokia assumes the characteristics of a “cosmic” city (Wheatley 1971). Sometime near AD 1050, workers dismantled, rebuilt, and significantly enlarged what had been a series of village-style habitation areas into an integrated monumental complex featuring three sprawling precincts, each with a monumental core (Pauketat, Alt et al. 2015). The principal precinct was Cahokia proper, which featured a “Grand Plaza” and 120 earthen pyramids, the largest the 30-m-high “Monks Mound,” which fronts the great plaza (Fowler 1997). The central pyramids in a series of lesser groups were surrounded by neighborhood houses and public architecture, most of which were aligned to a 5-degree offset grid known to archaeologists as the “Cahokia grid” (Reed 1969; Smith 1969). An earthen causeway ran parallel to this grid alignment for a kilometer south from the plaza through a swampy zone to a mortuary area centered on Rattlesnake Mound (Baires 2014a, 2014b; Pauketat, Emerson et al. 2015). The 5-degree offset and the overall plan of the city reference celestial entities and their motions, especially those connected to the moon and, more than likely, the night, death, and ancestors (Pauketat 2013b; Romain 2015).

For laborers at the time, all earthen construction was a highly ritualized process that probably first entailed cleansing one’s body in a ritual vapor, steam, or sweat bath. In fact, some of the circular pyramids at Cahokia, built after AD 1050, seem to have elevated circular rotundas, water temples, or small buildings commonly called “sweat lodges” or “steam baths” (Pauketat 1993; Pauketat et al. 1998:appendix). Excavations into the summit of the Emerald Acropolis, for example, an outlying shrine complex of Cahokia proper, revealed that as much as 10 percent of the late eleventh- and early twelfth-century buildings at that special site was of this circular variety (Alt and Pauketat 2015). These buildings included a small sweat-bath variety built for one to a few people. Near the middle of the sweat-bath floor was a hearth that, similar to historically known examples, would have been filled with red-hot rocks from which steam was produced when water was poured onto them from above. These and other larger rotundas are known at various “nodal” sites in the region as well as at Cahokia (Emerson 1997; Mehrer 1995). Several of the latter are up to 24 m in diameter, with large roof support posts (Pauketat 2005, 2013a). At least one medium-sized building appears to have been covered partially with earth (Pauketat 1993). Another large rotunda at Cahokia appears to have been ritually terminated and buried using a special mixture of yellow and black earth, inferred based on color photos from 1960 (Pauketat 2013a:82).

Across the Midwest and Plains centuries later, such buildings were similar in ways to spirit lodges, medicine lodges, and Midéwiwin “shaking tents.” All were spaces where animate forces might engage people (e.g., Bucko 1998; Hallowell 1960; McCleary 2015). In a sweat bath, the spiritual force would include the rocks and the steam themselves (Hallowell 1960:43). The words of the Lakota priest Black Elk, describing a portion of a sweat bath, testify to the animacy of the substances and the building:

O ancient rocks, Tunkayatakapaka, you are now here with us; Wakan-Tanka has made the Earth, and has placed you next to Her . . . O Rocks, you have neither eyes, nor mouth, nor limbs; you do not move, but by receiving your sacred breath [the steam], our people will be long-winded as they walk the path of life; your breath is the very breath of life . . . The leader now sprinkles water on the rocks . . . It is now very hot in the lodge, but it is good to feel the purifying qualities of the fire, the air, and the water, and to smell the fragrance of the sacred sage. After these powers have worked well into us, the door of the lodge is thrown open, reminding us of the first age in which we received the Light from Wakan-Tanka. (Brown 1953:37–38)

Animation was material, visible, audible, and palpable as water turned to vapors upon contact with hot rock and, filling the hemispherical interior of the building, led to one’s skin dripping with sweat. From water-in-pot to steam-from-rocks and water-on-bodies, this was a complete water-cycle experience. One left the bath purified and invigorated (Bucko 1998).

Based on his pan-cultural and diachronic review, Robert Hall (1997) considered circular sweat baths to evoke uterine mythic and practical associations. The history of such lodges is difficult to trace at a continental scale but seems clear in the greater Cahokia region. There, no formal sweat baths were built prior to Cahokia’s mid-eleventh-century transformation. Afterward, they were common architectural components of public-religious grounds until about AD 1200, when a series of poorly understood decommissioning events in the region saw the exodus or cessation of circular-building ceremonialism (Pauketat et al. 2013). One of the last circular buildings known in the region was incinerated at a rural nodal site several kilometers north of Cahokia at 809 ± 70 cal BP (Jackson and Millhouse 2003:table 19.1).

Fire was a common mode of de-animating buildings in the region (Baltus and Baires 2012). Burial under a mantle of earth was another common treatment given to special Cahokian buildings. Indeed, the earthen mantle used to bury animate buildings (sometimes following burning) was possibly the first of many in what was eventually recognizable from a distance as a mound (Pauketat 1993). In some of these mounds, as observed recently at a Cahokia-affiliated shrine complex in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, construction fills included loads of earth to which mollusk shells—in this case local bivalves—were added (Pauketat, Boszhardt et al. 2015). Such freshwater shells are known from some pyramids at Cahokia as well, as are Pleistocene-era fossil gastropod shells, which are commonly interpreted by archaeologists to be “incidental” inclusions in löess fills (Moorehead 2000). However, other studies of the Mississippian period into the historic era suggest that earthen construction fills (or “anthroseds”) were frequently specially manufactured (e.g., Salzer and Rajnovich 2000).

In addition to the shells, the organically rich, black backswamp (montmorillinitic) muds mined from watery swamp or lake bottoms were commonly used by Cahokians to construct and cap earthen pyramids (Fowler 1997; Pauketat 1993; Reed 2009). Two of the largest of the Cahokia tumuli, Monks Mound and Rattlesnake Mound, for example, included stacked soil blocks and thin-spread mantles of the black silty clay (Baires 2014a; Sherwood and Kidder 2011). Similarly, the single-event construction of the pyramid at the Trempealeau site in Wisconsin contained a black cap that sealed a core construction fill of yellow löess (Pauketat, Boszhardt et al. 2015). Notably, in other Cahokia-related complexes, yellow-plastered pits and temple floors are found capped with black silt or clay plaster, usually after a yellow plaster had first been smeared onto the floors (Pauketat 2013b). It is conceivable that such patterned building and construction styles represent material components of a creation story known to have involved the genesis of earth from water with the aid of water creatures (Hall 1997). As such, mollusk shell inclusions may not have been incidental but, rather, emplaced a living force from this watery world into the earthen monuments of Cahokia beginning about AD 1050 (see also Baires 2016).

Shells, Earth, Maize, and Fire

Far to the south in Mesoamerica, similar sweat baths and circular water shrines were integrated within the trans-regional religious-historical changes of the ninth and tenth centuries AD (Harrison-Buck 2012; McAnany 2012). Shrines in Mesoamerica (and the American Southwest) have been found accompanied by marine shell offerings, most prominently spiral whelk shells. Similar shells are known at Cahokia and across the Mississippian world; and the beginning of the importation of substantial quantities of these shells for the production of beads, gorgets, and cups was coeval with the appearance of circular buildings and platforms, both dating to the beginning of the Lohmann phase (AD 1050–1100). An early reading of this regional diachronic pattern by Hall (1973) led him to infer symbolic connections among water, shells, breath or vapors, and sweating; we may follow his lead and project the characteristic “Ramey scroll”—leitmotif of Cahokia—to have infused the Ramey Incised pot with the power of water and four longitudinally halved conch shells, usually set in a quadri-partitioned design field (figure 4.2; see also Emerson 1989).

Figure 4.2. Ramey scroll motifs on a Ramey Incised jar filled with maize. Photo by Timothy R. Pauketat, used with permission of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

More to the present point, almost all ceramic vessels made at and around Cahokia by AD 1100 were manufactured using the same backswamp silty clays Cahokians mined for use in constructing and capping mounds (Porter 1964, 1984). Such muds were less often used prior to the Mississippian era, which is defined based in part on ceramic technology, because of their poor mechanical performance characteristics (Rye 1976; Stimmel et al. 1982). Montmorillinitic muds, that is, have a high shrink-swell ratio when water is added or evaporated, inhibiting their use in constructing pots (Rice 1987). This negative performance characteristic is offset by the addition of calcium and aragonite supplied by burned and crushed mussel shells (Morse and Million 1980; Morse and Morse 1983). In fact, the burned-shell platelets both neutralize the ionic charge of the montmorillinitic clays and impart structure to the vessel wall, improving the durability of the pot and enabling round-bottomed vessel production (Million 1975). The final step of pottery production, of course, was hardening using fire.

Whether they understood it or not, the first potters to have realized the technological benefits of burned-shell and fired backswamp clays and with a genealogical lineage that ties them to Cahokia resided in a restricted locale in southeastern Missouri at least as early as AD 800 (O’Brien and Wood 1998:248–49). Within a couple hundred years, the technology had subsumed the people of the so-called Varney tradition (see figure 4.1). By AD 900 to 1000, certain of these Varney people were migrating to the pre-Mississippian village complex that would become the city of Cahokia (cf. Alt 2002; Kelly 1991; Pauketat 2003). That migration appears to have accelerated through the middle 1000s.

In the greater Cahokia region, the potters of the Terminal Late Woodland era (AD 900–1050) used a locally diverse array of clays and temper types. One southern group, for instance, burned and crushed fossiliferous limestone—locally, often containing traces of mollusk shell–like brachiopods—obtained from vertical exposures of rock in the bluff escarpment that surrounds and demarcates the Mississippi River floodplain (figure 4.3). The Varney potters who made shell-tempered wares and who immigrated to the Cahokia region presumably had a historical impact (Alt 2006). Indeed, most potters in the greater Cahokia region produced shell-tempered wares by AD 1100. Some of the southern potters who made limestone-tempered vessels held out until then, their vessels eventually becoming a specialty ware within the Cahokian realm (Kelly 2002; Pauketat 1998).

Figure 4.3. Brachiopod fossils in Paleozoic (Carboniferous) period limestone from St. Clair County, Illinois. Photo by Timothy R. Pauketat.

In any case, the transfer of shell-tempered technology did not happen abruptly in the Cahokia region or elsewhere in the Mississippian world, unlike other aspects of Mississippianization (e.g., the abrupt reconstruction of Cahokia and the introduction of sweat baths and circular pyramids at ca. AD 1050). The adoption of shell temper was a trans-generational process, as revealed by diachronic plots of shell-tempered sherds in accumulations of refuse (figure 4.4). For such reasons, some have used the diachronic pattern to argue for neo-Darwinian models of Mississippianization (cf. Pauketat 2001).

Figure 4.4. Line graph showing increasing amounts of shell temper in vessel assemblages at Cahokia from about AD 900–1100. Image by Timothy R. Pauketat.

Similar arguments have been made for the incorporation of maize into the diets of Terminal Late Woodland and Mississippian peoples, though the weight often given corn in explanations has been questioned (Fritz 1992). Like shell temper and montmorillinitic clays, the intensification of maize agriculture occurred as early as AD 700 to the southwest of Cahokia. Maize, which ultimately originated in Mesoamerica, is dated to this time at the Toltec site in central Arkansas and may have been transferred there by way of the American Southwest (Rolingson 1998). By the 800s it had become enmeshed in the lives of both Caddoans—who occupied modern-day Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma—and Varney-culture people of southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas. It is now thought to have made a late appearance in the greater Cahokia region, where it was not grown in earnest until AD 900. At that time, the household pottery wares diversified and seem linked in part to maize processing (Kelly et al. 1984). The processing of maize involved first removing the kernels and then either milling them (to produce a batter for baking) or roasting, boiling, and popping them over fire with the aid of ceramic baking pans, jars, and bowls. There is also evidence from the Cahokia region that maize kernels were sometimes processed using lye (ash and water), the latter obtained with the help of special ceramic utensils to filter water through burned limestone powder (Benchley 2003; see limestone-stumpware correlations in Pauketat 2013a).

From Embodied Consciousness to Cahokian Territory

The fact that both shell-tempered, backswamp clay pottery technology and maize agriculture were adopted more or less simultaneously (between AD 700 and 900) across the Midsouth and Midwest is striking. So, too, is the fact that maize production preceded Cahokia and other early Mississippian centers in the middle portion of the Mississippi valley by at least a century and a half. The pre-Mississippian era witnessed an influx of Varney-tradition farmers from southeast Missouri who were already farming corn and were predisposed to the floodplain landscapes of bottomland mud and mollusk shell that characterize the Cahokia region. The net effect of locals and non-locals intensively farming maize and producing mollusk shell–tempered ceramics reflects a newly intensified and sustained relationship with the odiferous backwater ecozones of major river bottoms.

Spring flooding of backwater areas and old oxbow lakes by the Mississippi River and its tributaries might have been good or bad for maize cultivation, depending on when and how much the river waters rose. In the early summer, as the river receded and waters in lakes evaporated, mussel shells littered shorelines—many the remains of meals left behind by enterprising raccoons and otters, with any residual remains of the soft creature inside the shells emitting a distinct odor not easily forgotten. People too intensively collected mollusks not only for food but also for use as tools and especially for pottery temper. By AD 1100, almost all potters living around greater Cahokia were producing ceramics using burned mollusk shell temper (Holley 1989; Milner et al. 1984; Pauketat 1998). Moreover, the shell content of the vessel was significant, with estimates indicating that shell temper consisted of as little as 20 percent to as much as 50 percent of the final pot (Steponaitis 1983:20). Depending on the size of the pot and the size and thickness of the shells, many dozens of mussel shells might have been needed for the manufacture of a single ceramic vessel. The densities suggest that potters were producing multiple pots every year (see Pauketat 1989). At this rate and scale, the routine gathering of mussel shells for temper alone would have significantly reconfigured and territorialized the relational fields of people and their associations with the environments—rivers, streams, oxbow lakes, and related swampy waterways—where mollusks thrive.

The fact that this territorialized relational field was developing simultaneous with maize intensification indicates the possibility that the two were intimately entangled. This is not to say, however, that the mode of entanglement was an intentional sort of calorie-maximizing “subsistence strategy” but rather an embodied rhizomatic relationship. Researchers have long noted that maize affords a reshaping of the human “rhythms of everyday life” in part through scheduling; people accustomed to growing other crops throughout the year who incorporate maize have to alter their farming schedule (VanDerwarker et al. 2013:164). The incorporation of maize not only changed how and when people farmed but, more important, how people co-mediated a watery, muddy world of organisms, substances, and phenomena—namely, water, mollusks, mud, and fire.

When it comes to water, for instance, maize is a sensitive plant. It needs the right amount of water at the right moments in its life cycle. Too little water early on and the plant withers. Its ears may be stunted and improperly pollinated. Too much water and the roots rot (Benson et al. 2009). Pre-Mississippian agriculturalists would have certainly understood this delicate balance, scattering their fields into both dry uplands and wetter bottomlands along river ways (Chmurny 1973). Hoeing into the difficult, clayey bottomland soils would have constituted a sensuous reminder not only of their organic richness but also of the muddy soils’ utility as clay for pottery manufacture. The advantages of pots fired with the shell inclusions may have taken little time to recognize (Porter 1984). Certainly, contemporary earthenware users in other parts of the world routinely and continually evaluate the functionality of vessels in relation to social identities, gustatory pleasures, and culinary practices (Aronson et al. 1994).

To make a shell-tempered Mississippian pot, both shells and the pot itself would necessarily have been subject to fire. When smothered, the open-air firing process used by Mississippians leads to a reducing atmosphere that embeds black carbon into the pot under production. The black color, common to Cahokia ceramics such as Ramey Incised wares (see figure 4.2), would appear to recapitulate the blackness of the bottomland muds used in earthenware manufacture, even as the shell temper (if not also the Ramey iconography) might mediate the pot much the way it had done earlier in the riverine biotic community from whence it came. Indeed, the vital energy of the mollusk, which is a locomotive creature, would have continued to mediate if not enliven in palpable, perceptible ways the pot or the foods or drinks prepared therein (in the sense of Bennett 2010). Even the fossil shells in limestone afforded a liquid that chemically altered the flavors and digestibility of maize. In this way, the mode of entanglement was a rhizomatic relationship that did not originate in any one place but was an ongoing co-mediation between human and other-than-human organisms, substances, and phenomena.

Such relationships enmeshed people and their agricultural practices, in part because mussel shells also comprised extensions of the human body as tools with which to dig into the earth and with which to consume certain foods from bowls. From the Halliday site, for instance, in the upland hills east of Cahokia, Varney-tradition immigrants from southeast Missouri engaged in intensive maize production using garden hoes with mussel shell blades and, later, cooked maize soups in their earthenware pots (figure 4.5). At Cahokia during its initial Mississippian phase, AD 1050–1100, great feasts were hosted in which delicate mussel shell spoons were employed (Pauketat et al. 2002). At these and similar ceremonial occasions, hosts and performers might manufacture, wear, and gift necklaces of marine shell beads and garments festooned with beads.

Figure 4.5. Mussel shell tools and utensils from Cahokia’s Mound 51 and Sub-Mound 51 pit: a–b, fragmentary spoons; c, mussel shell hoe blade, perforated for the attachment of a handle. Photos by Timothy R. Pauketat, Illinois State Archaeological Survey collections, University of Illinois, Urbana.

Certainly, the honored dead were lavished with marine shell objects. Mortuary remains in the ridge-top mounds of greater Cahokia were showered with marine shells, necklaces, beads in various states of production, and beaded costumes (Baires 2016; Fowler et al. 1999). The citizens of Cahokia even built this relationship of living-to-dead into their city’s very foundations by way of a causeway that ran from the central Grand Plaza a kilometer south to a mortuary zone. In the process it passed through a watery swamp of black clayey muds and mollusks (Baires 2014b; Baires et al. 2013; Pauketat, Emerson et al. 2015). Hence, from mollusks-in-mud, fossil-shells-in-rocks, mollusk-shells-in-mounds, and shell-hoes-digging-into-earth to shells-in-pots and shells-with-the-dead, shells embodied a complete life-cycle experience. Shell in some sense territorialized the world of the Mississippian farmers; their annual and daily lives were thoroughly mediated by these organisms, as well as the associated substance of water.

Water was itself a (if not the) vital ingredient. It was water, after all, that fell from the sky or flowed from the land, that was occupied by mussels, and that was swallowed by animals, people, and the roots of the maize plant. It was water that was added to and then driven by fire from the clay used to make circular pots. It was water that was also driven from the bodies of people who sat in circular baths filled with steam—the perfect vaporous mediation of rock, fire, and water.

Water was, then, agentic (Bennett 2010). As an all-pervasive rhizomatic substance, we could even credit it with the genesis of Mississippian lifeways, much as earlier archaeologists saw Mississippian culture as an outgrowth of riverine environments. But, of course, that greatly oversimplifies the matter, perhaps much as does crediting Cahokia’s rise to human agency alone. Thus, rather than isolate water as the singular source or agent, we should point to its thick entanglement with an infinite number of other substances, organisms, and phenomena, including corn, shell, earth, sweat, mussels, people, and fire. It did constrain or territorialize the movements of people, bundling them in a tight web of relations mapped onto specific floodplain-centric landscapes, creating a Mississippian way of life, community, and people. It probably made conceivable or comfortable the rapid transformation of a large village complex into a planned “cosmic” city, Cahokia (Alt 2012; Pauketat, Alt et al. 2015; Pauketat, Emerson et al. 2015).

So what changed around AD 1050? Did the water, mud, shell, and corn entanglements of such a relational field, composed of “thousands of linked events” (Gould 1994), simply gestate Cahokia and the other Mississippian places? Looking back at this place, described earlier, with a relational eye, we should first recognize what Cahokia was: the emplacement of a suite of relations—the physical properties, experiential qualities, and other flows or movements of entangled substances, materials, and phenomena that defined people and all with which they were connected. Cahokia, that is, was the materiality and spatiality of relations that would come to extend and transcend the pre-Mississippian web of corn, shell, earth, sweat, mussels, and fire. This is because the city of Cahokia, at its mid-eleventh-century foundation, folded into the Mississippian rhizome something new: cosmic order. Cahokia at its mid-eleventh-century reinvention connected the ground with the heavens above. That is, Cahokia seems to have bundled water, mud, shell, corn, and more with the cosmos through the cycles of the sun and moon (Pauketat 2013b). The significance of this knotting of a new strand into the fabric of life, this rhizomatic extension of affective experience, was to bind together and hence alter at a larger scale the relational fields of local farmers.

Precisely how this happened exceeds the scope of this chapter, though it is worthy of note that Sarah Baires (2016) emphasizes mortuary rituals and the “release” of human and nonhuman souls as paramount in Cahokia’s emergence. Suffice it to say that it need not have been an intentional act by a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, even if it was contingent on their agency. This is because the Cahokian poiesis was also contingent on the agency of the sun and the moon, if not other seemingly stochastic celestial events, such as a supernova in AD 1054 (Pauketat and Emerson 2008). People, in some sense, were subject to the affects of these luminous bodies.

Conclusion

Reconfigured in such a way and at such a scale, the city would have attracted people from far afield, connecting them to cosmic order and, in turn, producing Mississippian culture by realigning human experience in ways that produced something quite unlike the former pre-Mississippian existence (Alt 2006). In essence, Cahokia became what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call an “assemblage converter.” Perhaps people, especially would-be elites after the fact, took credit for the poiesis. Certainly, some archaeologists would give them full credit. But the real history, considered relationally, is considerably more complicated.

It might even be difficult to evaluate precisely if, when, or how Mississippian culture and the Cahokian poiesis would have been different had the genealogies of just a few of the thousands of co-mediations of people, mollusks, earth, water, and fire been a little different. Then again, it is apparent that reconfigurations of wider relational fields emerged from this greater rhizomatic, Mississippianizing history. This happened through the transfers and concentrations of key mediators—assemblages or bundles of people and technologies—that might be moved. Varney-tradition people, for instance, migrated northward, carrying with them their pottery know-how. This means that Mississippian history was not driven simply by a series of agents, human or otherwise. Rather, history was the result of relations stemming from the particular configurations and dispositions of relational fields.

To understand those configurations and dispositions, emphasis must be placed on the ways in which and the scales at which relations were mediated, which is to say, bundled, assembled, entangled, or territorialized. Those, in turn, are to be understood through the hows: how did the affects of the fields or landscapes and the sensorial engagements, emotional states, and chemical reactions resulting from or attendant to the affective entanglements define the mediators and rearrange the fields of experience? In the case of the Mississippians, little of this could be deduced by starting our investigation with the resulting Mississippian societies. Rather, we have analyzed the qualities and properties of substances and things at the most elemental of experiential levels to appreciate the “ways of life” that undergirded the Cahokian poiesis. After the fact, the rhythms of water, mollusks, corn, mud, and fire, embodied by the people enmeshed therein, would have added meaning and legitimacy to Mississippian life. Without them, there could have been no society.

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