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15Prelude to History on the Eastern Prairies JAMES A. BROWN AND ROBERT F. SASSO At the time of European contact, Indians of the eastern prairies possessed a cultural life that was organized around an economy divided between long-distance upland hunting ofbison or elkand localizedhunting and mixed agriculture. The semisedentary setdement practices associated with this economy were markedly different from those that had existed 500 years earlier. Then, the interior of eastern North America was populated by concentrated settlements supported by floodplain agriculture and localized foraging. Principle among these settlements was that of the American Bottom in East St. Louis, Illinois, with its great social, economic, and political center of Cahokia, which is commonly regarded as the archaeological key to the upper watershed of the Mississippi and the eastern prairies (Fowler and Hall 1978). As important as Cahokia once was to the area, by the time of European contact this site and similar towns were no longer occupied, and throughout colonial times it rested in complete obscurity. Except for a single instance in the early nineteenth century, resident native people laid no claim to the massive earthworks of Cahokia or its neighbors.1 Outside the greater Cahokia area, residence was so transient that by 1800 the distribution of cultures bore little connection to the cultural and political map of 500 years earlier.2 What happened to have led to such a change? Since the heyday of the Mound Builder myth there has been no lack of solutions posed for the apparent discontinuity between precontact and postcontact cultures in this part of the Midwest . Historians have offered their perspective, but largely from an eastern standpoint, and long after fundamental changes were well under way (e.g., Hunt 1940). Comparative ethnology has challenged the historian's perspective by pointing to aboriginal culture geography as indicating an earlier, more complex way of life identified with Central Siouan-speaking peoples that was overlain by cultures of Simpler eastern Algonquian societies (Howard 1965; Kroeber 1939). The details of this implied shift in culture type must rely on an archaeological perspective. The importance of historic textual and comparative ethnological sources of information notwithstanding, only archaeology identifies the principle events and places them in their proper sequence together with the cultural, biological, and natural contexts critical to any understanding of the dramatic changes that took place in late precontact times (Emerson and Brown 1992). Although each of these perspectives makes the contrast between precontact and postcontact patterns more, rather than less, complex, advances in the acquisition and analysis of archaeological information offer promising avenues for bridging the gaps between the perspectives offered by divergent fields of inquiry. Although the contribution of archaeology is just beginning to achieve its potential, certain patterns have emerged that make a review of our knowledge useful at this time. 205 206 JAMES A. BROWN AND ROBERT F. SASSO The Three Faces of the Past Comparative ethnology indicates that at the dawn of European penetration, the eastern prairies were inhabited by both Siouan- and Algonquian-speaking tribes who were identified with a distinct set of common economic and social practices (Eggan 1952; Kroeber 1939). The French identified the region as the "Illinois country" (Le Pays des Illinois) and characterized it as a populous one in which settled village life alternated twice a year with wide-ranging upland big game hunting. Although corn, bean, and squash agriculture was fundamental, subsistence was broadly based, with large-scale cooperative hunting of elk and bison along with wedand plant and animal exploitation (Brown 1991). A distinctive social organization was based on moieties of internally ranked patrilineal clans employing Omaha kinship terminology (Brown 1991; Murdock 1955). Although the cultures of this region were characterized by a mixture of traits common to groups in the Great Plains and the Eastern Woodlands, nonetheless a regional integrity did exist (Brown 1991). The antiquity of this pattern is only now becoming clear, although many unresolved problems remain. Archaeological evidence points to a long historical development in which the shift to the postcontact pattern to took place definitively around A.D. 1450. Historical perspectives have been influenced by the largescale migrations that characterized the eastern prairies from the outset of recorded history. As early as 1655, depredations by the Iroquois had forced resident peoples to flee west of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River (White 1991; Wilson 1956). Although the presence of French logistical networks within the region stabilized the tribal composition at first, westward expansion of Euroamerican semement, coupled with changes...

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