Ritual Traces and the Challenges of Detecting Late Precontact Rituals at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, IL

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ethnographic accounts of indigenous communities throughout the United States illustrate the many ways that ritual activities were deeply embedded into everyday life. However, moving to the American Midwestern archaeological record, treatments of ritual are typically limited to large, ceremonial sites and these everyday rituals remain overlooked. This paper explores the traces of ritual activities and complex challenges of detecting them at a 17th century village, Middle Grant Creek, at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in northern Illinois. Since 2016, excavations have focused on refilled, subterranean storage features. These features have produced unusual artifacts, including marine shell, painted pottery, and, perhaps unique to this site, red painted freshwater mussel shells. Alongside these data, thermal drone imaging detected a 28m, sub-rounded hexagonal enclosure, interpreted as a potential earthwork associated with ritual activities, possibly part of the Midewin rite. However, the archaeological signature of this enclosure has not yet been detected in our recent excavations. Combined, these data provide only glimpses of ritual activity at this village. This paper discusses the challenges of neither overstating nor understating the archaeological evidence of ritual at this late precontact site, and how, by adopting an integrated, comprehensive perspective, we can begin to address these challenges.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24196