Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power (review)

Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power. By Thomas E. Emerson. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. xv + 317 pp., figures, tables, acknowledgments, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper.)

Over the past few decades, more and more archaeologists have been exploring ways in which they might get at issues of power, gender, and other such realms previously considered closed to archaeological investigations. English scholar Ian Hodder and some of his colleagues and students have been key figures in the development of this “post-processual” movement, so-called because it rejects not only traditional descriptive materialist archaeology but also the theoretically driven “processual” or “New” archaeology identified most closely with Lewis Binford (although many others have contributed to its development) and the “evolutionary” or “adaptive” archaeology associated with Robert Dunnell and his students. Post-processual archaeology is sometimes criticized as going too far beyond the evidence, reading too much into things, lacking in objectivity—and for some studies this may be a fair criticism. In the mid-1980s, when papers presented at American archaeology meetings began to self-consciously adopt the language and style of post-processualists, this also was criticized, and again, in some cases this criticism was warranted. Like postmodern streams in cultural anthropology, post-processual approaches are sometimes abused and originality is sometimes overstated; the methods build on previous research and theory more than the revolutionary labels admit. But also like postmodernism in cultural anthropology, post-processual archaeology is neither useless nor a short-lived fad; it has continued to develop, in the United States as elsewhere, has contributed to some interesting scholarship, and now must be reckoned with.

Power has become one of the most-widely invoked analytical categories—sometimes becoming merely a reductionist, universalized, and meaningless gloss; Marshall Sahlins, for example, critically describes such uses as the “Return of the Superorganic” (Waiting for Foucault and Other Aphorisms, 1999, p. 56). That an idea can be misused does not negate its inherent value, however, and Emerson’s approach here seems reasonable and appropriate. If any site in the United States can be read in terms of power it would be Cahokia, the great Mississippian mound complex located just outside present-day St. Louis. Virtually from its discovery Cahokia has been interpreted in such terms, prompted as much by its sheer size as by the group internments, burial goods, spectacular ceramics, and other works of “art.”

But Cahokia was not an isolated site. As Emerson writes (1), to understand Cahokia one must leave it, examine surrounding sites, and establish a perspective. The complexity of the cultural system that included Cahokia really began to be revealed with excavations in the 1970s and ’80s, and continued work has added to our understanding of it. Settlement studies such as this have long been held out as establishing potential common ground for archaeological work and cultural anthropology (e.g., landscape studies in historical archaeology), and Emerson frames his question here: what was the relationship between Cahokia and other contemporary settlements and among the other settlements themselves?

Political and ideological mechanisms are used to relate these various sites and to make sense of the entire context. As a post-processual study, Emerson’s work takes material culture (artifacts, features, sites: the residue of human activity) as a text to be read and interpreted. Social theory—especially that of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and Timothy Earle’s work on chiefdoms—is used to elicit concepts of power that can help in this reading. Emerson offers fine summary sketches of several sites and detailed descriptions of certain key artifacts, and from these data and frameworks he builds an interpretation of the Cahokian world. Given the politicized nature of the field today, he is unlikely to persuade those who are not already inclined toward post-processual interpretations. But whether one agrees or not, the interpretations are clearly stated and supported, and the study contributes to the ongoing debates. As Emerson writes, “It is only by detailed studies such...