Cahokia: A World Renewal Cult Heterarchy

11. The “Rural” Settlement Pattern

11 The“Rural” Settlement Pattern The countryside settlement pattern of the American Bottom Mississippian period , this being the settlement component separate from the multiple-mound sites themselves, has been thoroughly analyzed and interpreted by Thomas Emerson (1992, 202–6; 1997a, 221–27; 1997b, 174–84; 1997c, 38–41, 62, 148). He refers to this countryside settlement sector as the rural component of the American Bottom social system, and this is perfectly in keeping with the view that Cahokia was the urban center of a dominant paramount chiefdom . In brief, his argument is that the Mississippian period population in the countryside was organized under a dispersed village system. The dispersed village comprised a set of kin-related commoners in their individual farmsteads, which were fairly widely spaced across the landscape in a local region and linked together through a complex of integrative institutions located in what he characterizes as household, civic, and ceremonial nodal sites. The household nodal sites were the residences of the local kin-group leaders, while the ceremonial nodal sites and the civic nodal sites were the locales of rural mortuary and fertility cults, and the local rural elite leaders, respectively. He interprets the fertility cults as initially having their cultural roots in the communities of the preceding Terminal Late Woodland period, while progressively coming under the dominance of the central ruling power in Cahokia. In effect, he treats both civic and ceremonial nodal locales as the essential ideological tools by which this paramount chiefdom came to fully subordinate and dominate the dispersed village population of the countryside during the Stirling phase. In contrast, I will demonstrate that the very same settlement data can be more coherently interpreted in terms of the World Renewal Cult Heterarchy model. As elucidated fully in chapter 9, this model characterizes Cahokia and similar multiple-mound sites as world renewal cult heterarchies that were cooperatively constructed by affiliated alliances of mutually autonomous cults. These multiple-mound locales served as monumental iconic media by which the cults could collectively discharge their sacred duties. This means that the social power manifested in these complex multiple-mound locales did not reside there but, instead, inhered in the locales of the autonomous cults, and 22 / Cahokia these were dispersed across the American Bottom and, possibly, in the nearby upland zone. When the conditions postulated by the World Renewal Cult Heterarchy model are coupled with the conditions postulated by the Dual Clan-Cult model, we can expect to find a range of ceremonial sites acting as the base locales of autonomous cults and clearly distinguishable from the clan-based sites of everyday domestic life, in terms of both spatial separation and material cultural content. Furthermore, as autonomous cults caught up in the competitive pursuit of reputation, differential scales in the complexity and variety of these base locales can be expected, these being a measure of their relative standing among their cult peers. Therefore, I argue that the sites Emerson characterizes as ceremonial and civic nodal locales can be more coherently understood in these autonomous cult terms than in the dispersed village terms that he postulates . However, I retain the use of the term, dispersed villages, while redefining these as the local networks of household nodal and regular household sites constituting and embodying the clan system. That is to say, I argue that the nodal household sites constituted the highest level of the dispersed clan network and, further, that the spatial separation of the nodal household and nodal cult sites is perfectly consistent with the radical bifurcated settlement articulation mode postulated as generated by the disengaging of the clans and cults, as briefly outlined in the summary of chapter 8. Hence, the ceremonial nodal sites were occupied by local autonomous world renewal cults that participated in alliances that affiliated to form the world renewal cult heterarchies. This means that the nodal domestic-like households and their surrounding regular households constituted the local dispersed village occupied by the network of clans. The Sequential Settlement Articulation Mode The best way to outline the relevant data is to summarize Emerson’s presentation and interpretation of the “rural” archaeological record. The use of quotation marks around “rural” is deliberate on my part since this term is not social structurally neutral. A rural sector exists only in complementary opposition to an urban sector. Entailed by the urban-rural polarity, of course, is a complex social, political, economic, and cultural relationship that in general can be characterized as dominance-subordination, center-periphery, specialized-generalized...