Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography

10. Osage Texts and Cahokia Data

10. Osage Texts and Cahokia Data Alice Beck Kehoe C ahokia has become an arena where proclaimed scientific evaluations of archaeological data meet more humanistic approaches, a contrast epitomized by George Milner’s The Cahokia Chiefdom (1998) and Robert L. Hall’s An Archaeology of the Soul (1997). Differences have been exacerbated in that most of the more recent, more detailed, and better-controlled data come from the highway mitigation project FAI-270, deliberately located in predicted less significant zones of the American Bottom. Having invested the major part of their professional lives in recovering and analyzing these data, FAI-270 archaeologists are understandably loath to minimize the contributions they might make to comprehending Cahokia; thus we see volumes such as Muller’s Mississippian Political Economy (1997a) and Emerson’s Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power (1997) leaping from rural or suburban sites into assertions about the Cahokia polity. Against these ‘‘from the ground’’ approaches (to which are oen tacked grand theory), I shall adduce Dhegiha Siouan oral traditions that correspond to a number of features at Cahokia: the Keller figurine, Mound 72, Ramey knives, ‘‘Woodhenges,’’ and the mounds and plazas of the built landscape . Francis La Flesche’s Osage and Omaha texts, from which I draw these correspondences, offer several parallels to Mesoamerican legendary histories and rituals that suggest connections between Mexico, Dhegihans, and Cahokia —perhaps through the persons with Mexican-style filed teeth buried in the American Bottom during Cahokian times (Griffin 1966:129). Backgrounding the controversies, sociology of knowledge points to nationalistic ideology (Kennedy 1994) and the legacy of Positivism (Kehoe 1998:82– 95, 126–128, 133–144) obfuscating an appreciation of Cahokia’s grandeur. The central place analogy must hold in archaeological interpretation (Kelley and Hanen 1988:378) directs us to examine ethnographies of the nations geographically closest to the American Bottom, of which Dhegiha Siouans were the most powerful at the time of seventeenth-century European contact. Recent discus- osage texts and cahokia data 247 sion over use of ‘‘oral history’’ for American archaeological material (EchoHawk 2000, Mason 2000, Watkins 2000) requires me to explain why I consider linking Dhegihans and Cahokia a tenable hypothesis. Some preliminary remarks on science, particularly historical sciences, underpin that discussion. Archaeology as a Historical Science The doyen of twentieth-century paleontologists, George Gaylord Simpson, laid out the method for historical sciences: We . . . observe present configurations and from them infer configurations that preceded them. The principle of actualism is essential for such inferences. Historical inference depends less on projection into the past of the immanent, construed in a static sense, than on projection of processes, which of course do depend upon immanent characteristics. For the most part, these processes are recognized and characterized as they occur in the present. . . . In the total study of . . . any history, there are three phases: (1) obtaining and studying the historical data, . . . (2) determination of present processes, . . . and (3) confrontation of (1) and (2) with a view to ordering, filling in, and explaining the history. (Simpson 1970:81, 84–85) Note that ‘‘configuration’’ is key to Simpson; processes occur within configurations . ‘‘Present processes’’ include ethnographically observed rituals and the myths they embody. Karen Knorr-Cetina’s ethnography of a chemistry laboratory led her to realize that Scientific enquiry [is] . . . constructive . . . in terms of the decision-laden character of knowledge production, [is marked by] indeterminacy and . . . contextual contingency—rather than non-local universality [and by] analogical reasoning which orients the opportunistic logic of research. (KnorrCetina 1981:152; her italics) Heisenberg’s 1927 statement of the indeterminacy principle established the contingency of all human observations (Kitcher 1989:449). The impact of physicists ’ indeterminacy upon historians, examined by Peter Novick (1988:138– 140), reflects the breadth of its implications. From a more historical sociology, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer discov- 248 ancient objects and sacred realms ered that ‘‘matters of fact’’ are constructed within ‘‘a disciplined space, where experimental , discursive, and social practices were collectively controlled by competent members’’ (Shapin and Schaffer 1985:39, 51–72, 78). Competency, they make clear, is declared by the members admitted to the discipline, a practice heightened by professionalization (Kehoe 1999:5). The barrier erected by extended formal academic credentialing may be challenged by members of marginalized classes (according to Patterson [1995:114–115], ‘‘the old buffer races from southern and eastern Europe . . . , gays and...