Exploring Kinship Ties through Mortuary Practice at Cahokia’s Ridge-top Mounds

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Kinship, roughly defined, is a web of social relationships forming a central part of human lives. Kinship contextualizes patterns of behavior, familial ties, socialization, parenting, and relationships that extend beyond biological affinity. In this paper I explore how kinship ties (fictive or otherwise) transform in death through an examination of burial patterns at Cahokia’s ridge-top mounds. Cahokia, North America’s largest urban landscape north of contemporary Mexico, was a unique social and political behemoth located in the American Bottom floodplain of the Mississippi River. Crisscrossed by large earthen mounds, plazas, and neighborhoods, this urban landscape was populated by diverse groups of people. Mortuary practice at Cahokia manifests in diverse ways; of particular interest here are the ridge-top mounds that house hundreds of bodies buried in unique assemblages of persons and materials. Focusing on Wilson Mound, I explore how kinship ties transform and transcend our common notions of ‘family’ to include other-than-human persons in these complex relationships. Considering ‘family’ as inclusive of multiple persons, not all of which are human, engages the rich dialectic of social experience. Examining this in and through death can provide an understanding of how the living viewed their world and experienced social relationships.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23407