Excavating a Mississippian Outpost

在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年夏天开始挖掘最近发现的位于密西西比河流域中部的前哥伦布卡霍基亚的“前哨”。Pauketat和Crew之前在这个和附近的五个密西西比村庄进行的几个季节的田野调查，现在都指向这个地点，以回答一个关键的研究问题：950年前(公元1050年)建造了北美首要的宗教和政治中心的卡霍基人，是否实际控制了该地区农村腹地的农业经济？到目前为止，其他遗址的挖掘提供了这种控制的提示性证据，但并不是决定性的证据。然而，这些其他遗址表明，具有不同文化背景的农民迁入了一个富裕的农业区，这与卡霍基亚作为地区中心的崛起不谋而合。在格罗斯曼遗址前两个季节的工作中发现的东西包括密集的非住宅建筑、奇异的文物和70把斧头的囤积，所有这些都在一个可疑的四面村庄内。这样的发现使它成为该地区农业村庄独一无二的。这些发现还使人有理由相信：(1)这一个村庄实际上是一群卡霍金人或密切相关的亲属或行政官员在农民中间建立的规划前哨；(2)附近其他农业村庄的建立是文化和自然景观总体规划改造的一部分。遗址出土的石斧的物理属性表明，开垦林地可能是卡霍基人建立农业制度并获得农民合作的重要手段之一。2002年的挖掘将通过在2500平方米的面积内机械移除受干扰的犁地带来揭示格罗斯曼遗址的空间规划，这一挖掘战略也是由于该遗址即将被城市扩张摧毁而需要的。该遗址将被完全挖掘，恢复一种考古学家很少检索到的数据。挖掘将要么验证计划中的高地位假设，要么证明该遗址缺乏中心规划。在任何一种情况下，卡霍基亚和内陆农民之间的关系都将从居民日常生活中留下的废墟中可见一斑。在这片废墟中，该团队将找到所有研究复杂社会的人所关心的一个核心问题的最终答案：这样的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也很重要，因为它是更好地全面了解普通人的文化传统和行动在多大程度上参与更大规模的政治变化的基础。

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.