Dickson Mound and Kampsville

Friday we drove from Springfield to Dickson Mounds, via the town of Havana where we visited Rockford mound.  At Dickson Mounds Museum, following a brief introduction by Director Michael Wiant, we were treated by Alan Harn, Assistant Curator of Anthopology, to an extended tour of the collection and the exhibit.  Alan has worked at Dickson Mounds for almost 50 years, and he also regaled us with stories of the history of Dickson Mounds archaeology and of the landmark dispute over display of human remains that centered there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Before departing the grounds, we viewed the excavations of three Mississippian buildings, now protected in large sheds.  One especially significant one contained the preserved remains of the building's frame, which had collapsed in a fire.

South down the flooded Illinois River we came to Kampsville and its Center for American Archaeology Visitor's Center and Museum (see http://caa-archeology.org/html/visitors_center.htm).  This small display, in a remodeled century-old store, holds nice little exhibits on the pre-Columbian indians, the archaeology of those sites, and the history of Kampsville itself.

From Kampsville we took the ferry across the Illinois River and drove south, stopping at the Koster farm, site of a famous stratified settlement site whose 14 layers range from the early Archaic to the late Woodland period (see the Wikipedia article on anthropologist Stuart Struever).  Continuing south, we stopped for dinner at Pere Marquette State Park Lodge, but before dining we viewed the river valley from the base of the park's imposing hilltop mound.

Mound sites in American Bottom

On Saturday we drove all over the St. Louis region to view various Mississippian and Late and Middle Woodland mound sites.

In East St. Louis we saw how the local archaeological society is trying to buy up delinquent property with archaeological value, especially mounds.  The idea is to connect these as a "green space" for the city of East St. Louis to use as some sort of park, while preserving their archaeological value.

We drove South to the Dupo area and saw many low mounds in the southern, Illinois portion of the American Bottom.  Then we crossed the Jefferson Barracks Bridge and returned north to visit Sugarloaf Mound in South St. Louis, one of three "Sugarloaf Mounds" in the area (the other two are in Illinois).  This is an extremely steep mound perched atop the river bluff.  A 1950 modern house is built into its top, and the mound's south side has been cut away, apparently to allow a now-vanished driveway into the backyard.  The Osage tribe is, this very week, debating whether to purchase this property, under the slogan "we built the mounds."  (See the Osage website for more information.)

From there we repaired to North St. Louis for lunch at Smoki O's little barbecue place on North Broadway, near the site of the long-gone Big Mound, largest of the North St. Louis group that gave the city its nickname.  Finally we journeyed back across to Illinois to see another Sugarloaf Mound atop the bluff near Edwardsville, and others in the area.

Our Oklahoma trip

Sunday we drove to Oklahoma.  We stopped off at West Tyson Park in St. Louis County, walking a mile or so into a hiking trail to look for the "craters" that marked Indian chert quarries.  Chert rocks could be seen all over the ground along the trail, and we found several small quarries at the top of the ridge.  We departed from Interstate 44 at Springfield and took U.S. 60 the rest of the way to Bartlesville, affording us a good look at sparsely populated Oklahoma ranchlands in the former Indian Territory of the Northeast part of the state.  (We stayed at the Hotel Phillips, a striking 1950 hotel still owned by Conoco-Phillips; we learned that it will close and be demolished in a few weeks.)

Monday morning, then, we drove to Doga Camp Environmental Nature Center near Fairfax.  Doga Camp is Victoria Graves's project to preserve Osage culture by providing an Osage spiritual experience on the land.  Victoria conducted a "purification ceremony" for us:  we assembled in a small sweat lodge she had constructed, with the help of a few family members and friends, where Victoria sang Osage prayers and spoke about the spirtual approach of purification.  Following the sweat lodge, we walked into the grasslands and woods on the site (along paths Victoria and friends had laboriously prepared), where, traditionally, one seeks insight.  We returned and assembled for a long talk in which Victoria answered our questions about the ceremony, her preservation efforts, and the history of the Osage.  We enjoyed a meal prepared for us by Victoria's sister Jo and friend Lynn; later her cousin Miriam came to visit.  We stayed all day; it was an enlightening experience in every sense.

We overnighted in Tulsa and visited the Gilcrease Museum before returning to St. Louis Tuesday night.  The Gilcrease is primarily known as a museum of Western art, and has an enormous display of paintings and sculptures by Remington, Russell, and many others, along with recent examples in the tradition.  In addition, however, the Institute maintains a huge artifact collection, including many Mississippian pieces collected by Perino and others.  (Many Mesoamerican and other Native American cultures are represented as well.)  Their display offers drawers and drawers of small artifacts below shelves of exemplary larger ones, indexed on-line with an extremely serviceable search program using workstations in the exhibit room; the database entries show the location of each object in the exhibit and tell a little about each one.  Eric Singleton, Assistant Curator of the Anthropology Collection, was kind enough to give us an impromptu behind-the-scenes tour of the collection.  Amazingly, given the extensive display, the percentage of objects in the collection that are actually on display is about the same as at the Illinois State Museum:  Eric estimated about 5,000 objects on display from the 320,000 in the collection.  The collection is working toward becoming a better-known and more heavily used research facility.

Who Should Control Preservation?

Terry Martin, Curator and Chair of Anthropology for the Illinois State Museum (ISM), shared several interesting thoughts with us concerning the implications of placing control over preservation policies at various levels of government or in various private hands.  I suggest that these considerations are tied up with the question of what is the value of preservation.

Dr. Martin noted that localities are sometimes more enthusiastic about, or attentive to, local preservation projects than are state agencies.  Moreover, state agencies sometimes hobble themselves with bureaucratic restrictions (such as the prohibition on ISM officials using state vehicles to travel to out of state conferences).  On the other hand, localities sometimes resist state regulations designed to protect sensitive sites when general principles of preservation conflict with particular local interests (which may be economic as well as cultural).  One big example, potentially, is repatriation policy as exemplified by NAGPRA.  In such instances, state or national authorities are in a position to establish standards desirable in the long run, which localities might sometimes be tempted to violate if they were free to do so.  It is unlikely that any coherent repatriation policy could be maintained by local action alone, and this inability would prevent productive cooperation between, say, Native Americans and preservationists, or other parties with competing interests.

All this applies not only to local government agencies but also, in part at least, to local private agencies.  "Friends societies" often provide indispensable political and financial support for cultural site protection.  Some private museums, such as Chicago's Field Museum, are among the best in the field.  On the other hand, local enthusiasts can sometimes be oriented toward development at the expense of preservation.  And museums often suffer when they are part of a university, even a wealthy private university, because other university goals get higher priority than does the perpetual maintenance of collections.

One conclusion I take from this is that there are some values of preservation that are important at the aggregate social level (states, the nation as a whole, the world) but that, at the local level, become under-emphasized collective goods or compete with other, purely local goals.

Illinois State Museum

Today we drove to Springfield Illinois.  We spent the remainder of the morning at the separate Research and Collections Center, where Terry Martin (Curator and Chair of Anthropology) and Jeff Saunders (Curator and Chair of Geology) showed us the facilities and some of the collections and described the work done there.  In the Anthropology Collection we saw some of the massive collection of Cahokia materials, of which we had seen samples, reproductions, or descriptions at the Interpretive Center.  Most notable were nearly whole pottery items, a huge collection of nearly whole whelk shells, and rolls of copper sheeting from Mound 72 burial.  This may have been our fourth day on Cahokia materials, but we were impressed by the size and quality of the collection.

After lunch, we went downtown to the museum itself.  Downstairs was occupied by an exhibit entitled "Changes," an educational display including museum items that traces the changes in land forms, life forms, and human society in Illinois.  Upstairs includes an American Indian exhibit and some interpretive life-size dioramas of American Indian life in what became Illinois.  We were a little disappointed in the limited inclusion and explanation of artifacts, and especially with the nearly complete omission of Cahokia from the story.  Really, both the interpretive displays and the material exhibits at the Cahokia Interpretive Center seemed superior.

On the fly, John made contact with Joseph Phillippe, of the Illinois Historical Preservation Agency.  This is the agency for designations of sites in the National Registry of Historic Places, and for approving construction and development of sensitive sites.  We visited their offices in the basement of the Old State Capital building and spoke at length with Joe and several colleagues about their work.  This was a most informative session.

Digging Mound 34

We spent yesterday at the John Kelly's excavation site at Cahokia Mound 34.  This was an opportunity not only to see close up the evidence underlying speculations about the Mississippian culture, but also to experience directly another aspect of the preservation process.  The site, now entering its third season, was re-opened this week by digging out the back-fill of the past two summers' excavation, using a backhoe.  Our jobs, in a small portion of that excavation, were:  remove the fabric coverings at the bottom of the previous dig;  re-survey the reference points for that area; and scrape away some remaining back-fill from the 50-year-old excavation by Perino.  Perino was primarily an artifact-hunter, using rougher methods than modern archaeologists, and interested primarily in large, easily identifiable pieces.  Where our digging tools were small trowels, his was a bulldozer!  He did, however, make some usable records and observations of what he uncovered.

A few small artifacts and ancient debris remained in the resulting back-fill.  We found a few dozen items, ranging from 2-inch fragments of animal bone, pottery, and chert to tiny particles of pottery, charcoal, and shell.  Sarah even found a deer tooth!

Tomorrow:  off to Springfield, Illinios, and the Illinios State Museum, official recipient of all artifacts located at Cahokia and other state-owned sites.  I'll continue blogging wherever I can find an internet connection, and even a little via cellphone email. 

At dinner tonight we talked over some ideas about who ought to be willing to pay, or to forgo valuable opportunities, for the sake of preservation, and under what conditions.  In addition to direct ancestral connections with the culture whose object is to be preserved, a lot of ideas focused on the tourism benefits to be derived from its preservation.

I asked everyone to consider the following question:  are there any circumstances under which a larger political unit (the state, the country as a whole -- or even the whole world, say through UNESCO) should be willing to pay in order to preserve something.  In other words:  what argument could one offer to a legislator from a distant part of the large political unit (whose constituents do not have direct ancestral connections to the culture, and who does not personally have such connections) to convince him or her to cast a vote that would make constituents pay for preservation?

To put it in yet other terms:  does preservation have public value beyond personal or local considerations?  (Presumably you'd need to describe such value to that legislator.)

Cahokia Interpretive Center

Today we returned to Cahokia and, after a brief visit to the Mound 34 site where John was supervising the removal of last year's post-season fill-in, spent the remainder of the morning in the Interpretive Center.  There we toured the exhibits (beginning with the slide show) while Bill related to us at length not only additional information about the artifacts and interpretations of the site, but also some of the philosophies, procedures, and experiences of designing the Center.

Before returning to WU after lunch to catch up with our reading assignments, we viewed a 23-foot canoe from Arkansas currently under preservation treatment in the maintenance building.  This evening:  dinner and seminar.

Methods of Archaeological Inference

One issue we discussed on Monday afternoon was the range and methods of archaeology. John Kelly and Bill Iseminger noted that archaeologists rely on a wide range of methods to draw inferences about past cultures. These include (my summary listing based on his comments): scientific measurement techniques such as carbon dating; careful site measurements and their logical implications; known facts about everything from astronomy to nutrition; "ethnographic analogy;" and post-modern ideas relating individual action to society and culture.

Ethnographic analogy is based on the assumption that a past culture that shares some characteristics with a modern-day culture (artistic and technological methods, etc.) will share other characteristics with that same modern culture. Hence, what is known about the modern or recorded historical Osage (as John says) or Natchez (as Bill notes) Indian cultures is often examined for clues to how the pre-historic Mississippians may have thought or acted, because there are similarities in the aspects those cultures that are observable for both time periods. This is an idea that deserves our further attention in the seminar, and might help us clarify our assumptions about culture in general.

Those post-modern ideas about the individual in society will bear further discussion as well. We haven't really gotten into any detail there yet.

The Cahokia Experience

Welcome to the 2009 Summer Seminar blog. Our topic this year is "Cahokia: The Process of Preserving America's First City," a course designed by Dr. John E. Kelly, Lecturer in Archaeology at WU. Today we enjoyed the deluxe tour of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, lead by John and by fellow archaeologist Bill Iseminger, Assistant Site Manager and Public Relations Director. In the process of gaining the perfect Cahokia Experience -- astonishing scale, architectural grandeur, historical awe, and expanded cultural perspective, not to mention a beautiful day with miles of walking and climbing -- the tour gave us the opportunity to discuss the work of archaeologists, the society and culture of the Mississippians, the challenges of preservation, and the complications of European versus Native American attitudes toward the site.

At the end of the afternoon, we retired to the Interpretive Center conference room to discuss a few of these issues in further detail, issues that I hope we'll return to in the next ten days. Our particular topics included: the political economy of the Mississippians; the wide range of inferential methods used in archaeology; and cultural attitudes about Native American sites and about preservation in general. I hope we can explore thoughts about these issues in separate blog posts as well.