Excavating a Mississippian Outpost

挖掘密西西比前哨基地

• 批准号: 0219308
• 负责人: Timothy Pauketat
• 金额: $ 2.56万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-07-01 至 2002-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0219308&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Excavating; Mississippian; Outpost

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.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，蒂莫西·波基塔特博士和一个经验丰富的学生小组将于2002年夏天对最近发现的位于密西西比河谷中部的前哥伦布时期的卡霍基亚“前哨”进行挖掘。Pauketat和工作人员在这个和其他五个附近的“密西西比”村庄进行的前几个季节的实地考察现在都指向这个地点，以回答一个关键的研究问题：卡霍基亚人是否在950年前（公元1050年）建造了北美首要的宗教和政治中心，实际上控制了该地区农村土地的农业经济？迄今为止，在其他遗址的发掘提供了暗示性的证据，但不是这种控制的确切证据。然而，这些其他遗址表明，具有不同文化背景的农民搬进了一个富裕的农业区，与卡霍基亚作为区域中心的出现相一致。在格罗斯曼遗址前两个季节的工作中，发现了密集的非住宅建筑，异国情调的文物，以及70个斧头的囤积，所有这些都在一个可疑的四边形村庄内。这些发现使它成为该地区农村的独特之处。这些发现也使以下说法变得合理：（1）这一村庄实际上是一群卡霍克人或其近亲或行政官员在农民中间建立的一个有计划的前哨站;（2）在附近建立其他农业村庄是文化和自然景观总体规划改造的一部分。该遗址的石制斧头的物理属性表明，清除林地可能是卡霍克人建立农业系统并获得农民合作的重要手段。2002年的挖掘工作将通过机械地移除2500平方米区域内的扰动耕地来揭示格罗斯曼遗址的空间规划，这一挖掘策略也是由于城市扩张对该遗址的即将破坏而必需的。该遗址将被完全挖掘，以恢复考古学家很少检索到的数据。挖掘将验证计划，高地位的假设或证明该网站缺乏一个中心计划。无论哪种情况，卡霍基亚与内地农民之间的关系将在居民日常做法留下的废墟中显而易见。在这片废墟中，研究小组将为所有研究复杂社会的人都关心的一个核心问题找到最终答案：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更广泛地理解全球政治也很重要，因为它是更好地普遍理解文化传统和普通人的行为在多大程度上在更大规模的政治变革中发挥作用的基础。