The Mississippian Emergence

5. Range Site Community Patterns and the Mississippian Emergence

John E. Kelly Chapter 5 Range Site Community Patterns and the Mississippian Emergence INTRODUCTION Based on over sixty years of archaeological investigations ' including twenty-five years of intensive field work, Cahokia and its satellite communities in the American Bottom have been shown to represent the most complex prehistoric sociopolitical system to have developed north of Mexico. A number of models have been proposed to explain how the Cahokia system initially developed. Those models developed prior to 1980 basically incorporated in situ development and migration , and, to a large extent, were based on the available data from salvage excavations of the 1960s, as well as on the more focused research of the late 1960s and early 1970s at Cahokia. These models are examined in greater detail in the next chapter of this volume. As a result of the FAI-270 archaeological mitigation project (1-270 project), the available archaeological data base for the critical five-century span (A.D. 600 -1100) that witnessed the initial development of Mississippian culture in the American Bottom has substantially expanded since the mid-1970s. This expanded and improved data base, particularly in regard to the timing of Mississippian development and associated changes in community organization and overall settlement patterning, has in turn encouraged a second generation of new and quite different models of Mississippian development. Begun in 1975, the 1-270 project was designed to identify and appropriately mitigate those archaeological sites situated within a 34 km section of the (onstruction corridor of proposed Interstate 270 (now 1-255) that extended from the Mississippi River near Columbia, Illinois north to an area just east of Cahokia Mounds (Fig. 16). Lasting two years and directed by the author, the initial pedestrian survey and site testing phase of the 1-270 project was conducted through the Illinois Department ofTransportation (mOT) under the auspices of the Illinois Archaeological Survey (lAS) (Kelly et al. 1979). A variety of techniques, including magnetometer survey and phosphate analysis (McElrath and Williams 1981) were used in the initial evaluation of the 59 sites encountered within the 1-270 alignment. Following initial site survey and evaluation, test excavations were conducted in order to more accurately establish the significance of the various sites and their eligibility for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Test excavations were conducted in 1976 and 1977 by mOT archaeologists in coordination with the field school programs of a number of universities in Illinois. Full-scale excavation of sites within the project alignment, again involving a number of different universities in Illinois, began in the spring of 1978 and continued until 1982. In addition to the 59 sites identified during the initial survey of the 1-270 alignment, another 32 sites located in areas to be used for construction fill were investigated during the five-year program of large-scale excavation . A subsequent 5.8 mi extension of the project alignment required excavation of an additional 17 sites between 1984 and 1985 (Fortier and McElrath 1986). 67 68 Kelly THE AMERICAN BOTTOM ca. 1800 • Mound Group Fig. 16. The upper American Bottom. An 1-270 publication series consisting of separate site reports, along with a summary volume (Bareis and Porter 1984) provide a detailed record of the archaeological information recovered during the project. A primary goal of the 1-270 project was to obtain community organization information, and to do this, large earthmoving equipment was employed to expose extensive areas of most sites. As a result of these largescale stripping operations undertaken during the 1-270 project, changes in the size and internal spatial organization of settlements over a long span of prehistory were documented, and the patterns of temporal change in community plans provided an entirely new perspective on the nature and timing of cultural evolution in the American Bottom. The interpretive value of this community plan perspective in the American Bottom was particularly striking for the period from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1100: five centuries that spanned the initial Mississippian emergence. This chapter focuses on a single settlement, the Range site, and its changing sequence of community plans over this 500-year period of rapid cultural change. Because ofits size and organizational complexity , the Range site was recognized early in the 1-270 project as having considerable potential for contributing to our understanding of the development of Mississippian culture in the American Bottom (Kelly et al. 1979; Bareis et al. 1977, 1981). While...