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No. 21
The Archaeology of the East St. Louis Mound Center: Part 1 – The Southside Excavations
edited by Timothy R. Pauketat with contributions by Kristin Hedman, John E. Kelly, Lucretia S. Kelly, Kathryn E. Parker, and Timothy R. Pauketat
(2005) 434 pages; 89 tables; 122 figures; 0 plates
1-930487-15-0
Edition: Paperback
Price: $25.00
See larger photo of cover
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| Description |
In the first few centuries of the second millennium present day East St. Louis was home to a native society that was part of one of the largest and most complex in pre-Columbian North America, known to archaeologists as the East St. Louis Mound Center. At its peak this center, located on a high ridge along the Mississippi River, possessed a political-ritual zone that contained as many as fifty mounds that were surrounded by the residences of thousands of its inhabitants. Although in its own right it was the second largest mound center in North America, it was actually only a segment of the greater complex of monumental structures that surrounded the great late prehistoric capital of Cahokia. It was an integral part of a half-mile wide continuum of mounds, plazas, and residences Timothy Pauketat has called a “political-administrative complex” that in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries stretched nearly eight miles from the St. Louis Mound Center in the west to central Cahokia in the east.
By the end of the thirteenth century the polity of Cahokia had waned and the American Bottom was largely deserted until it was reoccupied by the newly arrived Illinois Indian groups and their French allies in the seventeenth century. These groups did little to modify the landscape but the increasing influx of American settlers in the nineteenth century initiated a pattern of change that would seriously impact the great Mississippian monuments that dotted the valley. By mid-century the scale of landscape modification, accelerated by the railroads and expanding urban construction, began the process that would eliminate most of the visible remnants of the Mississippian period by the end of the century.
This process was most evident in St. Louis and East St. Louis where the modern cities were superimposed on the ancient mound centers. In East St. Louis the active encouragement of the city government to raise the level of the town to avoid flooding lead to the leveling of virtually all the prehistoric mounds. The devastation to the monuments was so complete that most archaeologists thought the site totally destroyed. It was through the efforts of Dr. Melvin Fowler and his student, Keith Brandt, in the 1970s that the archaeological community became aware that remnants of the pre-Columbian community might still exist beneath the modern streets and buildings. Not until 15 years later did archaeologists, John Kelly and Bonnie Gums, working for the Illinois Department of Transportation, gain an opportunity to conduct subsurface testing within the area of the central ritual zone of the East St. Louis site.
The results of IDOT’s testing were phenomenal—they revealed that portions of mounds, plazas, structures, and everyday activities had been preserved intact under the modern rubble of East St. Louis. The early practices of raising the level of the town had in fact preserved much of the earlier mound center. It is seldom that archaeological sites are given a “second chance” but the East St. Louis Mound Center’s discovery partially intact under the modern city truly provided modern scholars a second chance to learn about its long-dead inhabitants. Thus began an ongoing cooperative venture by Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program (ITARP) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Department of Transportation to investigate the extent of this large prehistoric center. This more than two decade long effort has included an extensive geomorphological testing program designed both to determine the extent and integrity of the archaeological remains and to reconstruct the landscape on which these people lived and built. Additionally, ITARP has conducted a massive excavation on the north side of I55/70 along a planned storm sewer that revealed buried mound remnants and ritual areas, and has carried out over a half-dozen smaller testing projects to locate other portions of the site.
The initial large-scale excavations in the East St. Louis Mound Center are reported in this volume. They are the result of an expansion in the width of Interstate 55/70 that provided IDOT archaeologist Dr. John Kelly and his crew with an opportunity in 1991 and 1992 to investigate a 5–10 meter wide, 250-meter long strip through the heart of the mound center. This portion of the East St. Louis site has been labeled the “Southside” to distinguish it from later 1999–2000 IDOT excavations on the “Northside” of the Interstate. As this volume, The Archaeology of the East St. Louis Mound Center, Part I: The Southside Excavations edited by Timothy Pauketat reports the archaeological results of that investigation were spectacular.
After the completion of the 1992 field season Dr. Kelly was responsible for the curation and analysis of the materials, first at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and later at the Waterloo lab of ITARP. During the six years from the end of the excavation to Dr. Kelly’s departure from the program in 1998 only limited progress had been made on the analysis of the Southside excavations. The lack of funding for the continuance of the research halted most activities although an attempt was initiated to obtain, consolidate, and inventory the collections. During this several year process it became apparent that the abbreviated excavation and curation practices employed during the project would make it difficult to reconstruct the field excavation process and track missing materials and records. By 2000 we had recovered as many of the existing records and materials as possible. That year IDOT made funding available to contract with Dr. Timothy Pauketat for a period of three months to complete the analysis and prepare a report on the Southside excavations.
In 1999 the planned construction of a large storm sewer system on the northside of I 55/70, immediately across from the Southside excavations, provided ITARP and IDOT another opportunity to conduct excavations in the heart of the East St. Louis Mound Center. These excavations provided additional information on mound locations, the construction of a ritual plaza, and, most importantly, revealed further evidence similar to that obtained in the Southside investigations that Cahokian elite were involved in the large-scale storage of comestibles in walled compounds far removed from access by the general populace. These findings are currently being analyzed and a companion volume in this series The Archaeology of the East St. Louis Mound Center, Part II: The Northside Excavations edited by Dr. Andrew Fortier is being prepared for publication. |
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