Surplus Labor, Ceremonial Feasting, and Social ...

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Surplus Labor, Ceremonial Feasting, and Social Inequality at Cahokia A Study in Social Process James A. Brown and John E. Kelly

The appearance of large-scale aggregations of population during the eleventh century signaled a transformation of the social order in large parts of the Midwest and the Southeast. These enlargements of settlement corresponded roughly with changes in subsistence, innovations in technology, and new ways of connecting people through ritual means. They are registered in so many material categories that archaeologists have marked the transformation as the beginning of Mississippian culture. Although commonly labeled the “Big Bang” (Hall 2006; Pauketat 1997), its scope points to a more general kind of structural change that William Sewell (2005) has labeled an event (Beck et al. 2007; Bolender 2010). While the factors leading to this eventful change have been hotly debated, one key aspect is broadly agreed upon—that changes in the structure of social relations had to be central. Key to understanding this web of relations is the concept of social surplus. This chapter argues that surplus is a critical vehicle for examining the social processes behind these changes in the structure of relations through the archaeological signatures they left behind. The thesis advocated here is that communal feasting in a kin-ordered society sets up the conditions for social stratification when the number of participating social units climbs past a certain threshold. Social surplus plays a key part in this process because large communal feasts are invariably underwritten by the combined efforts or the surplus labor of each unit. In this sketch, the surplus product has a minor role in the process despite the prominence it has been accorded in other scenarios (e.g., Pauketat 2000). The archaeological context of this argument is a single site, but the DOI: 10.5876/9781607323808.c009

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James A . B rown and J ohn E . K elly

principles involved are basic and the mechanics so simple to the point where it is difficult not to imagine that they have been repeated many times, with only slight changes in the terms of the example. Abrupt changes that took place at Cahokia around 1050 CE have come to be acknowledged as an event that had a major impact on the history of aboriginal eastern North America. While Cahokia may not have initiated this development, nevertheless it takes prime place in any discussion about the changes that led to the appearance of what archaeologists recognize as Mississippian culture. Its premier standing is a result of its more than 200 years of growth as a nascent city (Kelly and Brown 2014). With that recognition has come a search for the circumstances of this development and the reasons it took place at this particular moment in time along a particular stretch of the Mississippi River valley (Beck et al. 2007; Hall 2006; Holt 2009; Kelly 1990a; Milner 2006; Muller 1997; Pauketat 1994, 1997, 2000, 2008; Peregrine 1991, 1992; Schroeder 2004). Numerous factors have been proposed to explain this transformation. They include the adoption of maize agriculture (Schroeder 2004), the rise in bowand-arrow technology (Blitz and Porth 2013), the influx of migrants from distant places (Alt 2001), the dynamics of a trade network (Peregrine 1991, 1992), and the introduction of ideas from far distant Mesoamerica (Kehoe 1998). Each scenario is expressed as largely exogenous to the social contexts it is used to explain. The scenarios resemble the input factors in Robert Hall’s (2006:193) black-box model in which the transformation processes that took place in the box are entirely unknown. Since the box lacks transparency, it is opaque (ibid.). While some or all of these scenarios may have been implicated in one way or another, the absence of well-worked-out modeling of the social processes that entered into the transformation renders them less than persuasive individually. Moreover, each factor is vulnerable to questioning whether it occurred prior to or following the event. A case in point is the threat sudden expansion of population creates. While aggregation is often modeled as a defensive response to threats of deadly violence, the sudden concentration of population at Cahokia is unaccompanied by signs of defensive works until the twelfth century. Deadly conflict clearly has something to do with the later changes at Cahokia, but its role at the beginning of the eleventh century is not clear. The second model is the political effect successful completion of the building of Monks Mound has on consolidating the architect’s leadership over other capacities. Although the logic is persuasive, much of its saliency depends on dating. Was mound construction undertaken at the beginning of the overhaul of the Cahokia layout, or did it take place after the plazas were in place? All of the factors enlisted are as easily brought to bear on the city’s history after the eleventh century as before.

S urplus L abor , C eremonial F easting , and S ocial I nequalit y at C ahokia

Hall (ibid.:193–94) stepped into this debate with an important model that drew upon a specific local ethnographically established structure of ritual obligation. He set the debate in terms of how “many small, self-governing, and self-sufficient Late Woodland villages [of the pre-1050 period] disappeared into it . . . and multi-clan tribes emerged from it.” Specifically, he saw in the organization of descendent tribes the seed for transforming “independent, probably exogamous, bands and villages into interdependent exogamous clans” (ibid.:194). Mutual interdependence was created through obligatory intermarriage and the parceling out of rights and ritual obligations among individual clans. The structure of this distribution was such that the unity of the Omaha and the cognate Osage tribes depended on the obligation of each social unit to provide indispensible rituals at the calendrically appropriate time to satisfy ritual completeness. No single clan or smaller unit controlled this information. This scenario was made all the more plausible by the fact that among the Omaha, arguably one of the independent tribes descended from Cahokia, the word for clan was the same as independent village (ibid.). Hall illustrated these practices with details of the Omaha and Osage religion: Omaha and Osage religion was such that many observances and practices could not be performed by a single clan; the various clans and subclans each had some indispensable role that only they could perform even though the performance benefitted the entire tribal village. One Omaha subclan, for example, had the right and duty to provide certain ears of a sacred red corn necessary for a planting ritual, but they could not themselves perform that ritual. The corn was provided to a subdivision of a subclan of a second clan, and it was this other subdivision that fixed the time for planting and chanted the associated ritual. This second subclan also had the right to make and decorate the crook staff that was used by the director of the annual buffalo hunt as a symbol of office, but it did not have the right to provide the materials for that purpose. Dhegiha religion provided a fabric of privileges and obligations that bound society together and countered tendencies toward segmentation. Large figurines of a particular red Missouri fireclay known as “flint clay” are believed to have figured importantly in Cahokia fertility ritual (Emerson 1997). It is not hard to imagine that the right to quarry this material was restricted to a particular kinship group, the right to manufacture the figurines to members of a second, and the priests of a third to conduct the related ritual. (ibid.:194)

Surplus

The subject of surplus had a tumultuous career in archaeology during the 1960s and 1970s. It led to the questioning of the applicability of this concept in self-sufficient

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economies when the formalist-substantivist debate was taking place in economic anthropology. The unfortunate result of this debate was that the subject was taken out of the history of social relations as Karl Marx positioned it (see chapter 1, this volume). We return to his position, which for anthropologists has the benefit of being articulated in detail by Eric Wolf (1982), namely, that the history of social relations, broadly conceived, is key to understanding cultural practice, not the other way around. Our argument can be framed as follows. The aggregation of formerly autonomous groups in a central place like Cahokia has to have led to a great increase in social relations, both in number and scale, as a direct consequence of the mass of relations alone. New relations and modification of preexisting ones naturally follow. It can be anticipated that among them will be collective rituals featuring feasting as a major component because of the special place eating together has in cementing social relations among humans (Hayden 2001). The new demands aggregation placed on groups that had hitherto held each other at arm’s length dictate mediation through collective ritual in the form of communal feasting. We argue that the social players in these rituals stand on equal footing. This is an important principle for assuring mutually acknowledged privileges and obligations that are essential for effective collective action. Through its participation, each group signals its willingness to buy in to the collective social arrangement. While this contract may serve the interests of participants at the outset, it is nonetheless vulnerable to becoming out of balance over time—socially, economically, and politically. Another way of stating this is to observe that communal feasting runs the risk of being undermined by asymmetry and lack of balance in the contributions participant groups make to the celebration. The more disadvantaged groups tend to be forced to become subordinated economically to the more advantaged, with the result that significant inequality could manifest itself over several generations. As indebtedness or inequality becomes entrenched, social stratification is inevitably promoted. When domestic autonomy resides in kin-ordered modes of production, this logic provides a plausible narrative for the rise of elite-dominated political structures while simultaneously maintaining these modes of production. Hegemonic Co-option of Traditional Practices

Social inequality is typically envisioned as a by-product of the actions of the chief as a powerful central agent, for example, as described by Service (1975), Milner (2006), and Pauketat (2000) (cf. Hall 2006). Pauketat, for one, in over a score of publications, has consistently maintained that a central leader or would-be chief had priority in the process of sociopolitical change during the eleventh century. The most complete articulation of Pauketat’s (2000:117) argument states that the


practices “of many people in social negotiations” lead to domination—that is, to the “control to some extent [over] the practice of others by accommodating, if not-co-opting, the surface phenomena [overt, visible practices] that comprise tradition.” This is consistent with a definition he supplied: “A Mississippian polity may be defined as a centralized population governed by an institutionalized administration, usually thought to include a simple hierarchy of chiefs, councilors, and native aristocrats” (ibid.:125). Pauketat (ibid.) envisions collective work projects as necessitating a coordinator, who becomes increasingly critical to the realization of more ambitious projects. This leads to centralized administration of projects outside of traditional cultural practices. In this scenario, cooperating farmers entered what we would term a process, with no clear collective sense of where collaboration was leading them. Furthermore, “The hosts of ritual gatherings were probably acting in a traditional manner, continuing the tradition of the minimally centralized precursors of the Mississippians” (ibid.:122). Pauketat continues: “All people of some particular formation may have accommodated change if it was little more than the subjective co-optation of their traditions. In monuments, we see not the consequences of political actions to legitimize centralized authority but these formations in the process of becoming” (ibid.:123). Hence, he visualized a direct relation between the activity of mound construction and the arrogating of power and authority. The agenda of a leader entailed the co-option of collective traditions by an agent. Through repeated calls for collective action, this agent or his or her successor led in directing the activity of mound construction and other laborious efforts that validated his or her authority. In short, monumental constructions necessitate administrative direction that with repetition leads to the validation of central authority through the collaboration of workers contributing their sweat. Pauketat’s top-down formulation marginalizes the degree to which inequalities in power are presented in collaborative, “corporate-style” polities or, for that matter, the role they logically play in social processes of elite formation (Trubitt 2000). The deployment of what Wolf (1990, 1999) terms structural power is every bit as instrumental in achieving elite dominance through covert means as is central leadership in achieving dominance overtly. What makes structural power useful in the present regard is that it thrives in the form of collaboration treasured in simple kin-ordered societies. The T yranny of Surplus Labor over Collective Celebrations

The acts that brought hitherto independent social units into a single collective enterprise establish the seeds for social stratification as long as the enabling conditions

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remain intact. In other words, incipient social stratification is embedded within corporate kin-group organizations. A multi-group feasting environment on a large scale sets the stage for significant changes in social relations. Traditional practices in Pauketat’s formulation remain stable and enduring. Indeed, the demand for compliance to form has precedence in his formulation for change in social relations. Our focus on communal feasting in multi-group collective rituals leads us to an analysis of social labor as a form of social surplus. A certain degree of social inequality can be anticipated in the way participant groups relate to each other in these large multi-group feasts and celebrations. Not only would groups vary in the number of able-bodied adults, but their life chances would vary as well, with the consequence that by the third generation at least, some groups will inevitably find it difficult to uphold their ritual obligations because of relatively weak labor potential. Such difficulties not only jeopardize undersized groups’ claim to membership, but the solidarity of the entire collectivity is placed at risk as well, depending to a degree on the way the organization is knit together. It is obvious that community-wide ritual celebrations could only have worked in collective contexts with the concurrence of special social relationships. As long as collective cohesion is paramount, a premium comes to be placed on the equivalent standing of all participant groups. With the solidarity of the community at risk, the collectivity can be reconstituted or it can remain intact by the groups that are better off coming to the rescue of undersized partners to maintain balance. The social implications are significant when weaker social units find it difficult to maintain their ritual obligations to the collectivity. Cohesion through unity becomes such an imperative that specific steps have to be taken to offset instability. Under these conditions, strong kin units can lend the requisite labor to weak units to clear and prepare agricultural fields and to assure a stream of food and other resources. In such a way, the units with strong adult membership become richer in their ability to muster resources and, by extension, to create conditions of indebtedness among those less fortunate. Consequently, strong social units develop a level of authority that is difficult to challenge, while weak units find it difficult to sever relations because of their obligations. If weak social units take the step of breaking from the dominant units, their low numbers make them prey to exploitation outside the protection of the collectivity. Thus, the bond created by collective ritual performance mandates social obligations for all members that exact a high cost to escape. The removal of any single social unit from the protection of the collectivity poses a risk of outside predation, which under most circumstance entails a severe penalty for desertion. The social contexts of collective ritual become not only the situations in which social labor works to provide the resources for food prestations but also constitute a fund of social labor from which less able participants can borrow. In short, the life


histories of constituent groups tend to gravitate toward inequality because of chance fluctuations in the sizes of groups that take place over generations. Thus, changing fortunes become the basis for socioeconomic inequalities, which lead to stratification. Only strong social-leveling measures of constraint can counter this process. While such practices of constraint have long dominated eastern North American societies, it takes little change in the cost:benefit ratio to effectively release these tribal aggregates from the constraints (Champagne 1992; Gearing 1962). Turning to other Mississippian societies, Barrier (2011) finds little in the archaeological record to support the thesis that surplus production was centralized economically. Further afield, Stanish (2004) has advanced an argument parallel to ours for the Middle Formative Titicaca region in the Andes. He explained the rise of “rank-” type societies as a consequence of reciprocal obligations in collective feasting. In the absence of the least coordinated households, production was elevated through ritual obligations in communal celebrations. Quoting Barrier (2011:3), “Stanish’s argument describes, in broad detail, how household autonomy may be voluntarily or unintentionally forfeited and how competitive relations and socioeconomic inequalities benefitting elites are often institutionalized.” Class For mation

It has been taken for granted that the formation of social stratification after the 1050 CE event was a consequence of the prior exercise of centralized power controls through the office of an overt leader. Increased social inequality thereby became a consequence of the exercise of power by a leader or chief. Leadership has been assumed to have been the logical prior cause of the course of social history in eleventh-century Cahokia. The ontological primacy of central leadership fits the strong place it has in evolutionary narratives developed in the fields of sociology and anthropology (e.g., Service 1975). Social classes are not usually regarded as a key element in the formation of social complexity (Blanton et al. 1996; Feinman 1995; Stanish 2004). Rather, they have been considered a later development, most commonly with the beginning of political states. Instead, class is hidden within the typologies of trans-egalitarian or ranktype societies (e.g., Hayden 2001). But banishing social class from consideration in pre-state societies requires some rethinking. First, the existence of social classes in every sense of the word has been observed in what many would regard as tribal organization. Levy (1992) and Wolf (1990, 1999) have described the Hopi and Kwakiutl cases at length. The list could easily be enlarged if social processes were emphasized in analyses of North American societies instead of the structure of marriage and ritual obligations, which are subject to social processes. Second, social classes

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themselves are impacted by these same processes; perhaps the most relevant here is the effect of a surplus economy. In this regard, the economic and political impact of class structure has to be different depending on whether classes have access to and control over a source of wealth that is independent of the subsistence economy. Class power in these kin-oriented societies is exercised indirectly in what Eric Wolf (1982) has called structural power, which can be characterized as the ability of sponsors of communal projects to control the agenda. Kin-oriented societies combine in a counterintuitive way, through “collective appropriation, political hierarchy, institutionalized inequality and ‘class struggle’ over the conditions of surplus appropriation” (Saitta 2005:31). Turning to Dhegihan societies, both the Omaha and the Osage distinguish an upper class. In these and related groups, the category of sub-clans identifies particularly rich lineages in a few clans that not only have exclusive rights and privileges but also the economic muscle to host feasts on their own (Bailey 1995; Dorsey 1884). From a structural point of view, sub-clans are analogous to the Hopi class of “most important people.” In describing Hopi classes, Jerrold Levy (1992:31) states: “These strata have all of the features of social class except for the upper class’s lack of control over any economically rewarding means of production.” Levy (ibid.:51–53) used the 1900 federal decennial census to document the extraordinary concentration of agricultural potential clans of the upper class possessed. This concentration was matched by membership in multiple societies in addition to the clan society. A significant advantage was obtained from demographic factors of age, fertility, and children’s survival rates. By strategic use of the personal strengths of individual members, these upper-class clans managed their clan property better than did lower-class clans. There is every reason to conclude that the 1900 Hopi were led politically by means of the exercise of structural power. Surplus, Labor, and Social Relations

Our point of departure is the set of social relations that are fundamental to the economy; from that consideration we move to other social relations that often fall within the category of political economy. In the “Central Control Figure” scenario posed earlier, massive earthmoving exercises are taken to be a manifestation of some degree of control by the elite over the labor of the non-elite, all the while operating under allegiance to traditional practices. While the degree to which authority was centralized at the outset of monumental construction is left unspecified, it is basic to Pauketat’s thesis. Indeed, surplus is commonly conceived of as extracted through some sort of elite coercion and even in the form of tribute (Pauketat 1997; Pauketat and Emerson 1997). The degree of authority that accrued from directing massive


earth constructions is problematic (Brown 2006). The necessity for elite domination to have accompanied this or any other event has already been critiqued in print (Beck et al. 2007; Saitta 1994). To take one specific scenario, the large earthmoving constructions that are a conspicuous hallmark of the post-1050 period were made possible by the power of would-be elites to extract resources and labor from local-level producers. As a consequence of the strength of their authority, elites were able to solidify their power over labor by transmitting their dominance to their descendants and thereby create an upper class that had not existed previously (Pauketat 1994, 1997). The problem with this mode of reasoning is that no threshold is known to separate socially volunteered effort from work performed under political constraint. Processes that chart the transition are never specified; nor are the ways developments are marked. We have no idea when a small amount of collective and volunteered labor becomes quantitatively large enough to qualify for domination (Brown 2006). Hence we are placed in the trying position of having to jump from one arbitrarily defined social “state” to another. Our focus on social relations takes its primary cue from Marx, who saw the logic of embodying social processes within social relations and made tracking that process through time constitute social history. Social process, social relations, and social history have since become a settled starting point for the analysis of both economy and society. In his analysis of economic relations, Marx laid down a perspective of social processes that saw them as constructed through specific histories. Social relations, such as ideology, that were not networked into the economy were marginalized as superstructure. As Norbert Elias (2000) argues, this exile from social process is unnecessary. The latter’s advocacy of social history as social process helps expand the kinds of social relations outside an economic network of relations. While economic processes remain highly determinative of the configuration of social relations, other elementary functions, such as violence management and the acquisition and transmission of knowledge, are vital for human societal functioning as well (Elias 2000, 2009; Wolf 1977). Wolf and Elias, to name but two, are scholars who have remained true to Marx’s processual orientation by avoiding the problematic segmentation of history into various types. Relations among individuals exist in web-like figurations without the superstructure of any higher-order “system.” The totality of social relations creates society. Social change results from the realignment and alteration of relations. Consistent, indeed directional, change arises through processes that emerge from systematic alteration in sets of social relations. Consequently, a set of different mutually connecting social relations can be specified that allows a discussion to move beyond the confines of purely economic relations, as foundational as they are.

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Kin-Ordered Social For mations

Eleventh-century Cahokia clearly belongs to the combination of social relations, technology, and ideology Wolf (1982:75) has defined as the kin-ordered mode of production, the most basic of three modes by which societies transform nature: “Each major way of doing so [organizing production] constitutes a mode of production—a specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge.” Wolf (ibid.:91) has provided important elaboration: “Kinship can then be understood as a way of committing social labor to the transformation of nature through appeals to filiation and marriage, and to consanguinity and affinity. Put simply, through kinship social labor is ‘locked up,’ or ‘embedded,’ in particular relations between people . . . These social relations permit people in variable ways to call on the share of social labor carried by each, in order to effect the necessary transformations of nature.” These relations also create what Wolf called a “kinship license,” in which “the circle of kinship is drawn tightly around the resource base by means of stringent definitions of group membership” (ibid.). Social Surplus

In kin-ordered modes of production, primary control over the acquisition of food and other necessities of daily life is procured within the domestic unit in which it is consumed. Collective acquisition of resources is undertaken with the understanding that whatever is produced is accessible to everyone who has jural rights. Surplus in Middle Range societies is produced collectively and apportioned by communal design or consent (Cobb 1993:46–49). Collective initiatives, rather than demands that are exploitative, are the rule. Even in cases in which surplus is extracted through some sort of elite coercion or as tribute, it coexists with the basic mode of kinordered relations. Surplus in this perspective is what individuals in a world of social relationships take or make from the natural world in excess of their immediate needs, which can be conceived of as a household budget (Wolf 1982). It is material created by social labor over and above whatever needs require satisfaction among individuals. Labor is work executed among individuals, whatever the relationship (Barrier 2011; Cobb 1993; Saitta 1994, 1997, 2005). Social surplus has considerable saliency in economic relations. Although the focus of surplus often rests on food production and other products of labor, we have chosen to focus on social labor itself. In the context of the early Cahokia model, surplus labor is envisioned as critical to meet social obligations created by ceremonial feasting. The demand for this labor is indicated particularly by


the level and significance of monumental construction. Labor is critical at the beginning of the agricultural cycle so the harvest can meet expectations outlined in prestations at ceremonial feasting—that is, by the transformation of nature through social labor, to paraphrase Marx. The increasing scale at which maize agriculture was adopted in the preceding century must have constituted a critical shift in the locally dominant mode of production. We propose to outline the potential role surplus labor has in understanding social change in kin-based societies, of which Cahokia was undoubtedly representative. Our particular perspective follows Marx by tracking the historical process by which power differentials accumulate among economic social units of unequal size and productive potential in sheer energetic terms. In the case of labor, “Once it is possible to talk about labor in general, however, it also becomes possible to visualize how society in general allocates labor to the technical processes of work and apportions the products of labor with the social whole. Such allocations of men to work, such apportioning of the societal product always moves through the medium of the social relations which govern the societal whole” (Wolf 1977:31). Cahokian Social Relations in Early Mississippian Times

Our specific focus is on the Early Mississippian form, to the extent that it can be distinguished from the modes of production in force over the duration of 500 years in the Southeast and portions of the Midwest. Because it is not a simple form of kin-ordered society, it can be conveniently termed a Middle Range society. The Early Mississippian Period, from AD 1050 to 1200, stands in a position to be more historically informative of events around 1050 than are later periods, when regional and cultural specializations color the picture. The Muskogean cultures of the Deep South have questionable relevance to the case of the midwestern city of Cahokia because of many differences in organizational detail. Welch (2006) has indicated Muskogeans’ cultural preference for unencumbered ritual performance in contrast to the Dhegihan Siouxs’ preference for enclosed performances inside dedicated ritual buildings. The standard southeastern cases were formed in different cultural and historical regimes and under different natural environmental contexts. In Middle Range societies, the study of economy has focused on three aspects: (1) the production of agricultural surplus, (2) the deployment of labor engaged in communal projects (surplus labor), and (3) the use of tokens of stored value.

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Agricultural Production

The first of these aspects, agricultural production, is key to provisioning the population. Although other sources contribute importantly to diet (L. Kelly 1997, 2000, 2001), it is principally maize that occupies our attention (Fritz and Lopinot 2007) because cereal grain is not only a highly rewarding food source but one that yields readily to investment of labor in the fields devoted to it. The importance of its extended period of maturation, from August through October, cannot be overstated. In this respect, maize is more rewarding in carbohydrate yields than seedbearing species with a longer history of exploitation in the Mississippi River valley. In the case of Cahokia and the surrounding American Bottom locality, the potential for food surplus is indicated by the increasing ubiquity of maize remains during the centuries preceding the 1050 time line. This trend is understood to be of primary importance in indicating the increasing security of the means for sustenance (Schroeder 2004; Smith 1989). Among other Mississippian centers, Casey Barrier (2011) has argued that the agricultural surplus identified at Moundville was created by groups at the local household level and not by central leadership. Even by Early Emergent Mississippian times, small communities possessed centralized storage facilities (Kelly 1990b; Kelly, Ozuk, and Williams 1990). Earthmoving Labor Archaeological signatures of surplus labor are evident in many contexts during the early centuries at Cahokia. Evidence of labor is present in the erection of massive mounds and large buildings, the leveling of public spaces, and the procurement, erection, and removal of substantial ritual-marking posts (Dalan 1997; Dalan et al. 2003; Kelly 2003; Milner 2006; Pauketat 1996, 1997). The most conspicuous investments of labor took place around 1050, when Cahokia became host to a population significantly larger than before (Milner 2006; Pauketat and Lopinot 1997). The settlement effectively became reestablished as a large planned city centered on a ritual core (Kelly 1996; Kelly and Brown 2014) (figure 9.1). The source of this population increase appears to have been in-migration from communities in the region that were formerly independent entities. The area from which this influx drew appears for extended distances up and down the Mississippi River valley and well beyond the confines of the American Bottom itself (Alt 2001; Pauketat 2003; Pauketat and Alt 2003). The site more than doubled in size by expanding to the north with the north plaza, which extended off the natural levee and into the low-lying area of an old meander scar. At the south, an extensive landfill project was required to build up and level a ridge and swale landform (Dalan et al. 2003). The ritual core was anchored by the 30-m-high Monks Mound, covering about 7 ha and from which


Figure 9.1. Map of the center of Cahokia showing areas discussed in text.

four large plazas radiated in each of the cardinal directions. Each of these plazas was itself a substantial labor contribution. We should not lose sight of the planned coordinated effort implicit in the design of the Cahokia site. A communal focus is present in plazas and certain mounds (Dalan 1997; Dalan et al. 2003; Knight 1989; Milner 2006). But some of the

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mounds lining the plazas and many of the ritual posts were likely erected and maintained by specific social units, whether clans or sodalities. The impetus for these works was likely to honor the sacred forces that affect daily life. The construction of mounds is usually thought to honor certain sacred forces (Knight 1989). Contrary to most impressions, little mound building entails substantial labor (Milner 2006). But quantity is not the total picture. The repetitiveness of adding new layers of fill to mounds and deeply setting and later pulling sacred posts at possibly annual cycles conveys the degree to which labor inputs were a recurrent feature of social life. The case of the massive Monks Mound is clearly of a different order of magnitude. The core appears to have been erected in two spurts, with minimal interruption between them (Schilling 2013). The labor involved in plaza filling and leveling is important at Cahokia (Alt, Kruchten, and Pauketat 2010; Dalan et al. 2003:119; Kelly and Brown 2014), but it does not stop there. The plaza-clearing aspect is less well-known, but it follows the often-observed mandate that dance grounds be purified by diligently removing all of the clutter and debris contaminating the surface (Swanton 1928). The labor of procuring, preparing, and erecting large posts was a recurrent effort during the period (Kelly 1996, 2003; Milner 2006, Pauketat 1997:43). We should not overlook other forms of collective labor. The parallel rows of ridges of agricultural fields at the site are significant in this regard. The integrity of these rows necessitated a coordination of work to prevent the convergence and intersecting of individual rows (Gallagher 1992:97, fig. 4.1). The benchmark example for this time period is the ridged field buried by the construction of a platform mound at Macon Plateau (GA) (Reilly 1994). The same logic applies to the digging of slot trenches that served as footings for sapling-framed buildings of all kinds. Sites where trenches have orientations in common point to the presence of collective engagement of labor. All three of these manifestations of surplus labor are found in the post-1050 period. From a comparative standpoint, collective labor in field preparation and perhaps elsewhere is one of the distinguishing features that separates Upper Mississippian from core Mississippian manifestations. The evident purpose of the plazas was to enact collective rituals, for which abundant evidence exists in the massive amounts of special debris cast into an open borrow pit as backfill to level the Grand Plaza and support the construction of Mound 51 (Pauketat et al. 2002). The social contexts of this and other plazas alert us to the importance of social participation in collective ritual. The size of the plazas indicates the potential scale of these aggregates. The Grand Plaza alone covers conservatively an estimated 16 ha (Iseminger 2010:24). Regardless of whether there were ever enough participants to fill a single side of this plaza,


its design envisioned the involvement of numerous distinct social groups. Many students of Cahokia have argued for such a multiplicity of social entities at this period of time by pointing to the material evidence of diverse origins in ceramicproducing social groups (Alt 2001; Hall 1975). It is this multiplicity of distinct social groups, however defined, on which an important dynamic in social relations can be sketched. Shell Beads as Tokens

Tokens of stored value in the Cahokian case are marine shell beads (Trubitt 2000, 2005). Note that we sidestep the place of craft specialists in this model to focus attention on structurally important features of Cahokian society that are potentially crucial to make the proposed model work. Beads and other objects have a long and conspicuous history of being created from whelks (Busycon sinistrum) and other marine mollusca (Claassen and Sigmann 1993). The sources of whelk shell are quite distant and cannot have been acquired directly from the shores of the Mississippi Delta. Waters there are too brackish to sustain these molluscan species. The prime collecting places are located along the Gulf Coast of Florida (Brown, Kerber, and Winters 1990; Kozuch 1998). Both dead mollusks tossed up on beaches and live specimens acquired through diving have value, although the latter are obviously more prized because they make the best cups and gorgets (Milner 2003, 2006). By extension, we can suppose that in the world of exchange, high-quality shell beads would have had greater value. The means whereby marine shells were transported so deep into the interior remains unclear (Kelly 2012). Although an established system of trade existed in the Great Lakes basin since the Late Archaic period, the volume of shell, some of it from worm-eaten beach-salvaged molluscan shells, points to bulk transport, at least in part (Milner 2003). Much of the reduction of the shell mass into usable artifacts and particularly beads meant access to a sizable quantity of raw material. Transport of sufficient supplies of raw material 900 miles or more from the beachside sources implies more than individual partnerships in down-the-line exchange. While not ruling out this means of access, bulk transport by water would appear to have been the only feasible way of accomplishing this task. Social Processes in Early Cahokia

The engagement of social surplus to offset a collective’s economic stresses sets in process the accumulation of indebtedness of less economically viable constituent

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groups to a social collectivity that requires their participation in group-bonding rituals. These rituals arise in the context of the strong appeal of persuasive politics under a spiritually driven spokesperson. Robin Beck has argued that this kind of politics was the basis for the 1050 event at Cahokia (Beck 2006; Beck et al. 2007). The case for elite-dominated political modes to have been an outcome of social processes rests on factors that can be applied at Cahokia. One of the basic building blocks of Dhegihan Siouan society is the division of the sum total of ritual knowledge into specific sacred texts, as well as packages or sacred bundles of spiritually charged objects, under the care of specifically designated individuals in each participating clan (Bailey 1995). Regardless of whether a clan is numerous or sparse, wealthy or poor, each has exclusive control over a segment of the total of the sacred knowledge necessary for a complete annual round of ritual celebration. We might legitimately question the application of this social arrangement hundreds of years before European contact. But the formal similarity between the encirclement of clan tents around the sacred pole of the He’dewachi ceremony for nineteenth-century Omaha (Brown 2011) and the rectilinear surround of mounds flanking the quadrangular plazas strikes us as more than coincidental. This layout is certainly constructed through design. The Grand Plaza is sunken slightly below the level of the surrounding terrain (Kelly and Brown 2014). Bordering the plaza is an elevated strip of land above both the level of the plaza and the extra-plaza terrain beyond. Mounds stood on this rimlike elevation. This threefold separation of elevations brings to mind the cosmovision pervasive in the hemisphere of a “beneath world,” “this world,” and an “upper world.” The mounds and the elevated strip would thus correspond to the upper world, the elevation beyond the plaza with this world, and the plaza to the beneath world. The arrangement of mounds flanking the plaza recalls the arrangement of clan and sodality lodges around the Omaha tribal circle (Brown 2011). Among the Omaha and related Dhegihan tribes, society is divided into sky and earth moieties, in which the sky stands for the upper world by day and the beneath world at night. The earth moiety stands for this world. The main difference between the Grand Plaza and the Omaha tribal circle is the preference among the latter and related tribes for the flanks to border the north and south sides around a central axis. The axis of the Grand Plaza is clearly aligned on the north-south axis of the epicenter of Cahokia. The east-west orientation is expressed in the east and west plazas that comprise the arms of the overall cruciform arrangement of plazas. From these considerations, we conclude that the mounds flanking the square of the Grand Plaza were connected with groups assigned ritual practices among clans and that the arrangement is structurally similar to the special locations of tents in the Omaha tribal circle. This leads to


the conclusion that the rituals performed by groups with special positions around the plaza were effectively grounded in a collectivity by the cosmically ordained structure of the layout of the plaza. The Grand Plaza and Social Processes

In the Americas, the focus of communal life is the plaza, around which domestic quarters are placed. An account of the history of the settlement plaza provides an important indication of the social processes operating during the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the American Bottom, the plaza became well established by AD 900 as a central space free of residential buildings and anchored by a central post and two other types of central facilities: a large square structure and quadrilateral storage facilities (Kelly 1990b; Kelly, Ozuk, and Williams 1990). A plaza became a conspicuous architectural feature at the Range site during Late Emergent Mississippian times (Kelly 1990b; Kelly, Ozuk, and Williams 2007). While open spaces had existed within settlements for many centuries, only in Late Emergent Mississippian times did they attain crisp definition on the ground. At Range, the quadrangular house structures press along the open space in a squared-off fashion, readily delimiting the bounds of a formal plaza. The size of each of the plazas at Range is about 0.06 ha (Kelly 1990b; Kelly, Ozuk, and Williams 2007). A century later the Grand Plaza alone delimited a space of 16 ha, many times larger than the examples at Range (Dalan 1997). The 100 years or more preceding the 1050 CE event were particularly important in revealing that the processes that later became overt were already operating. Small-scale plazas formatted Emergent Mississippian settlements: “The . . . architectural layout of the Range site offers the first evidence of social ranking in the American Bottom, along with an initial—if localized—attempt at political consolidation (Kelly 2000:169, 172). But such early steps toward the material representation of ranking appear to have been isolated, with no visible physical evidence for broad-scale integration” (Beck et al. 2007). The intensifying economic activity appears to have been measured by the increased presence of disc beads and other shapes produced from the walls of marine mollusca. Shell bead craftwork began to grow in prominence during Emergent Mississippian times. While direct evaluation of craft specialization is difficult to measure, the increasing presence of marine shell items (particularly in the form of shaped beads) in mortuary and domestic contexts after 900 CE has likewise been cited as offering key insights into the changing exchange relations (Kerber 1986; Trubitt 2000, 2005). Another economic indicator is the appearance of a more rapid process for producing fibrous string. The 900–1050 period is marked by the

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prominent appearance of Z-twist cord impressions on ceramic surfaces in a historical context that has relegated this direction of twisting to a distinct minority. A prominence here is usually held to be the result of using a spindle whorl to produce cordage instead of rubbing the cord elements on the weaver’s thigh. The implication of spindle-whorl production of Z-twist cordage is that cordage production had speeded up or intensified (Alt 1999). The production, if not the intensification, of an exchangeable product is implied. Thus, two different material types provide parallel indications of the expansion of economic relations. The communal consumption of comestibles leads us to the connection between diverse kinds of surplus and social process. Production and consumption can be taken as evening out according to local productive conditions. The mechanism for appropriation is a detail we can venture here. The large scale at which Cahokians participated in collective feasting during the eleventh century argues at a minimum that surplus labor played a key role in the appropriation of food (Kelly 2001). The rights and obligations involved in that appropriation are conceived to have been parceled out among the family units that composed the entire social body. Finally, we have a dynamic signature—that of feasting, which as a collective enterprise engaged surplus labor. Its material signature is well-represented at Cahokia by wellpreserved borrow pit fill that was leveled off and sealed (ibid.; Pauketat et al. 2002). Conclusion

A testable narrative is drawn that connects agricultural production, surplus labor, and the growth of inequality through the recurrent indebtedness of small or otherwise weak social units. Such a connection is crucial if a realistic sketch of social life can be credibly linked to production and surplus and built into an argument for likely conditions surrounding the 1050 structural event, to use William Sewell’s (2005) terminology. Anything less is tantamount to conceding the explanation to abstractions of the “black box” kind endemic to systems analysis (Pauketat 1997; Pauketat and Emerson 1997). To achieve the goal of making the connection cited earlier, we must adopt a bottom-up perspective by taking a social process perspective rather than a systems-dependent top-down one. In this portrayal of the circa 1050 period of structural transformation, surplus labor offers a conceptual way of modeling the rise of elite households as an exercise in the deployment of such labor in a kin-oriented society. As long as a positive attraction to places such as Cahokia existed, those locations continued to grow. At the same time, the levers of surplus labor operated to create patterns of indebtedness that over several generations resulted in social stratification.


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