Mediating Powers, Negotiating Inequalities: Ecological Politics at Cahokia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Native American city of Cahokia originates in the creation of a cosmologically powerful landscape formed by the gathering of human and other-than-human participants (including earth, water, and fire) (see Pauketat 2013). At this center humans and their nonhuman partners mediated relationships between Worlds (Upper, Middle, and Lower), often involving the gathering and manipulation of "vibrant" (or potent) materials (after Bennett 2010) in everyday as well as domestic contexts. Here, I consider how local variations of involvement in those negotiations or differential access to the means of engaging with other-than-human agents likely created social inequalities and internal divisions. Changing relationships between humans and other-than-human agents within the Cahokian landscape, including periods during which relations of cooperation and complementarity became points of conflict, seemingly created fractures along new and existing cleavage points (e.g., gender, kin group, sodality, neighborhood, or local community). This paper explores unraveling networks of humans and other-than-human persons in the context of a major depopulation during the late twelfth century and reconfiguration of the political landscape of Cahokia during the thirteenth century. I consider evidence for environmental change as transformative of local relationships between humans and other-than humans within an animate landscape rather than causative of "collapse."

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32098