Excavating a Mississippian Outpost

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Timothy Pauketat博士和一个经验丰富的学生团队将于2002年夏天对位于密西西比河中部的前哥伦布时代的卡霍基亚的“前哨”进行挖掘。Pauketat和他的团队在这个和其他五个附近的“密西西比”村庄进行了几季的田野调查，现在都指向这个地方，以回答一个关键的研究问题：卡霍基亚人在950年前（公元1050年）建造了北美最重要的宗教和政治中心，他们是否实际控制了该地区农村腹地的农业经济？迄今为止，在其他遗址的挖掘提供了这种控制的暗示，但不是明确的证据。然而，这些其他遗址表明，不同文化背景的农民在卡霍基亚成为区域中心的同时，也迁入了一个富饶的农业区。在格罗斯曼遗址前两季的工作中，发现了密集的非住宅建筑、异国情调的文物和70个斧头的宝藏，所有这些都在一个疑似四边形的村庄里。这些发现使它在该地区的农业村庄中独一无二。这些发现也让人相信：(1)这个村庄实际上是一群卡霍基亚人或近亲或行政官员在农民中间建立的一个计划中的前哨站；(2)附近其他农业村庄的建立是文化和自然景观整体计划转型的一部分。该遗址出土的石制斧头的物理特征表明，砍伐林地可能是卡霍基亚人建立农业系统并获得农民合作的重要手段之一。2002年的挖掘工作将通过机械移除2500平方米的耕地区域来揭示格罗斯曼遗址的空间规划，这一挖掘策略也是城市扩张对遗址即将造成破坏所必需的。该遗址将被全面挖掘，以恢复考古学家很少检索到的数据。挖掘将要么证实计划的、高地位的假设，要么证明该遗址缺乏一个中心规划。无论哪种情况，卡霍基亚和内陆农民之间的关系将在居民日常活动留下的碎片中显而易见。在这些碎片中，研究小组将找到所有研究复杂社会的人都关心的一个核心问题的最终答案：这些社会及其农业系统是如何建立的？这个问题反过来对社会科学和扩大对全球政治的理解很重要，因为它是提高对文化传统和普通人的行动在更大规模的政治变革中发挥作用的程度的一般理解的基础。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Timothy Pauketat and an experienced student crew will undertake in the summer of 2002 the excavation of a recently discovered "outpost" of pre-Columbian Cahokia, located in the central Mississippi River valley. Several previous seasons of fieldwork at this and five other nearby "Mississippian" villages by Pauketat and crew all now point to this one site for an answer to a critical research question: Did Cahokians, having constructed the premier religious and political center in North America 950 years ago (@ AD 1050), physically control the farming economy of the region's rural hinterlands? To date, excavations at other sites have provided suggestive but not definitive evidence of such control. These other sites have, however, shown that farmers with diverse cultural backgrounds moved into a rich agricultural zone coincident with Cahokia's emergence as a regional center. Discoveries from two previous seasons of work at the Grossmann site include densely packed non-domestic buildings, exotic artifacts, and a hoard of 70 ax-heads, all within a suspected four-sided village. Such finds make it unique to the farming villages of the region. These finds also make it plausible that (1) this one village was actually a planned outpost established in the midst of farmers by a group of Cahokians or closely related kin or administrative functionaries, and (2) that the establishment of the other farming villages in the vicinity was part of an overall planned transformation of the cultural and physical landscape. The physical attributes of stone ax-heads from the site suggest that clearing the woodlands may have been a significant part of the means whereby Cahokians instituted an agricultural system and obtained the cooperation of farmers. The 2002 excavations will reveal the spatial plan of the Grossmann site by mechanically removing the disturbed plowzone in a 2500-square-meter area, an excavation strategy also necessitated by the imminent destruction of the site by urban sprawl. The site will be totally excavated recovering data of a sort seldom retrieved by archaeologists. Excavation will either verify the planned, high-status hypothesis or prove the site to be lacking a central plan. In either case, the relationships between Cahokia and the hinterland farmers will be apparent in the debris left behind from the day-to-day practices of the residents. In this debris, the team will recover the ultimate answers for a central question of concern to all that study complex societies: How were such societies and their agricultural systems instituted? This question is in turn important to the social sciences and to a broadened understanding global politics because it is a basis for an improved general understanding of the extent to which cultural traditions and actions of ordinary people play a part in larger-scale political changes.