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184 Generation of the Cahokian Leviathan innovation were the high-ranking aspirants to and holders of chiefly office. Efficiency must be defined from an elite perspective. Given that chiefly agents would have sought to reproduce their power, it can be expected that Mississippian political culture would have included specific technologies, ritual knowledge, and ways of organizing labor, particularly as these relate to agricultural production (to be appropriated by the elite). The centralization of agricultural and fertility rites would have gone a long way toward diffusing the high-ranking notions of the cosmos and its relationship to the masses. The ways of the new and prestigious (Lohmann-phase) lords of Cahokia may have been inherently powerful by virtue of their knowledge of and control over exotica and esoterica. The spread ofMississippian political culture need not havebeen coerced; collaborative political tactics might have been all that were needed to diffuse it. The consensual adoption of Cahokia-Mississippian political culture thus was also the spread of the ideas of the dominant subgroup(s) of the American Bottom social formation. Mississippian political culture hence appropriated the historically constituted traditional cultures of the hinterlands, merging with them and later becoming the Mississippian cultural tradition in the region. Moreover, Cahokia-Mississippian would have had an expansionistic quality independent of direct political authority or perhaps even centralized ritual. A whole suite of agricultural and nonagricultural knowledge orways ofdoing things may havebeen desirable to the people living along the margins of the American Bottom region beyond the direct control of Cahokia simply because of its association with the knowledgeable and powerful lords of Cahokia. This may have included the manufacture of pots using crushed shell temper or the construction of buildings using wall trenches. The expansionistic quality ofMississippian political culture was, in a sense, the playing out of a long-term cultural-hegemonic process discussed in chapter 2. The development and eventual disintegration of the Cahokian polity was also a consequence of this same process. The Ascent of Chiefs The cultural-hegemonic process, involving the diffusion of an elite ideology and the alienation of primary producers, goes a long way toward explaining the appearance of what might appropriately be labeled the divine chiefship of the Stirling phase. Manifestations of this chiefship include Ramey iconography; the redundant use of color and shape symbolism ; the continual pursuit of mound, temple, and hearth construction and renewal; and the central constructions of the Post-Circle Monument, Generation of the Cahokian Leviathan 185 giant domiciles, rotundas, and compounds. It is noteworthy that the construction ofthe first Post-Circle Monument-anelite-controlled device for the ritual interaction with the cosmos (Smith 1992a)-corresponds to the earliest occurrence of Ramey iconography that also represents the order of the cosmos (Pauketat and Emerson 1991). Given this correspondence , one could speculate that the Cahokian elite found it desirable or necessary to promulgate their elite values and beliefs about the cosmos and the commoners in a series of coeval material expressions eithervisible to or ultimately received by commoners. This potentially abrupt arrival of the material trappings of divine chiefship at A.D. 1100 (calibrated time) might signal the inauguration, re-inauguration, or renewal of a paramount officeholder who employed a set of strategic efforts to lay claim to cosmic power (enabled by the political-economic development of the Lohmann phase). However they were introduced, the symbols ofthis transformed paramountcy persisted for decades; Ramey iconographylasted for a centuryor more! The suspected templesand domiciles oftheStirling-phaseCahokian elite were big, perhaps indicative of their enlarged social prominence. The Stirling-phase elite ideology was not simply a short-lived political tactic; it was authority transformed. For the first time, representations of deities (e.g., sky-world thunderers) were associated with a medium presumably manufactured under the aegis of chiefly officeholders and intended for political underlings and the nonelite masses (Pauketatand Emerson 1991). Color and shape symbolism embued the important buildings of Cahokia; construction of elite monuments was a focal point of regular centralized rites. Given this sort of sacral authority, it canbe assumed thatStirling-phase officeholders would have been entitled to tribute and corvee simply by virtue of the sanctity of chiefly office. There might have been little incentive for the sort of collaborative tactics suspected to have characterized Lohmann-phase political arenas, and, in fact, the density and diversity of exotic goods in the refuse of 15A-DT and other Stirling-phase central and rural samples do appear to decrease (Pauketat 1992:39).At the same time, Stirling-phase rural locales...

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