Past Action: Present and Future

Timothy Pauketat is an emergent figure in Mississippian studies. His many contributions include monographs, such as Temples for Cahokia Lords; books such as The Ascent of Chiefs and Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippian World; edited volumes such as Lords of the Southeast and Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World; and many provocative articles.¹ He has been in the forefront of efforts to use concepts of agency and practice in our understandings of the past. I feel privileged to have worked with him in his early career in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, and I looked forward to reading Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, with great interest.² As I expect from Pauketat, the book is indeed passionate and intellectually challenging. It cannot be summarized or comprehensively assessed without a lengthy essay, perhaps even one longer than the book itself. For myself—whose knowledge of Mississppian has been acquired in casual reading, chance visits to excavations and surveys, and conversations over many a beer—any useful comments must be at a general level.

The first and most surprising point one must understand about this book is that—its title notwithstanding—it is not a dismissal of the importance of chiefs and even chiefdoms in the North American South. They were the lived reality in much of this vast region for many centuries. Rather, it is a plea for a different way of looking at these cultural realities. If there is a polemical—even angry—tenor to the earlier and later chapters of this book, it is perhaps because earlier pleas have not been heard. In this brief essay I will try to summarize my understanding of some of Pauketat’s different ways of looking at these realities, and the reasons why some archaeologists have not heard, or have heard and not accepted, these ideas.

Most fundamental to Pauketat’s thinking is the axiom that all social participants have agency, and that a focus primarily on “chiefs” strips agency from a majority of the participants in these communities. Years ago in Ann Arbor, perhaps the very first time we spoke, Pauketat made this point, and it is a good one. It follows from this axiom that actual cultural trajectories are so complicated that no two are alike. If I understand Pauketat, this requires that in order to gain a general knowledge of the trajectories of past communities, we have to study the interrelated histories of the interactions of agents. To decide what past communities should be included in the field of study, Pauketat elaborates a multilevel construct integrating regional settlement structure, the plan of centers, public buildings in centers, and domestic buildings in all kinds of settlements, which enables him to recognize local cultural developments of interest. Armed with this construct he examines a series of developments across the South. The primary focus seems less on the lived realities of these cultural formations at the level of action, and more on the evidence of their inception or disappearance. He suggests that some develop from local circumstances, but others result from the immigration of entire communities or of segments of communities. Similarly, he suggests that some disintegrate because of local circumstances, while others are victims of war. The emphasis is on histories of external contacts, migrations, and attacks.

Pauketat next turns to what he argues is the ultimate source of these external forces, a body of material he knows well, the early Mississippian transformation of the American Bottoms around Cahokia. He characterizes this transformation as involving a new center from which multiple and competing sources of power manipulate the symbols defining and integrating groups and reorganize the surrounding countryside. Pauketat adapts this characterization from scholars who view it as a descriptive of “states,” a description no one who has actually worked with the archaeology of the first states will recognize. To his credit, Pauketat has the good sense to realize that definitions are not an issue central to his own concerns. Surprising to me is the limited extantiation of agency and practice and the limited discussion of exactly how the development around Cahokia affected developments elsewhere...