Mississippian Religion

Religious structures have always been formed to shape the spiritual experience of the celebrants who created and used them. It is no accident that the cavernous high ceilings of large cathedrals can make humans feel small; it is to remind humans of their place in the cosmos in relation to their god. Places and architecture, as well as being shaped by people were, and are, created to shape what people do, and how they do it (Rapoport 1990). But buildings do not just shape action: they are a part of affect, defi ning and shaping who people are and how they navigate their particular entanglements in the world. Here, I present new ideas about the relationship between religion and architecture in the Mississippian world. These ideas are being developed based on evidence from the Emerald site (Figure 7.1), a shrine center located in the uplands adjacent to the American Bottom of Illinois (Alt 2013 ; Alt and Pauketat in press ; Pauketat 1993a ; Pauketat and Alt in press). Emerald, I argue, holds evidence for understanding how Mississippian religion began, and based on this evidence we have begun to suspect that this religion, so thoroughly entangled in all aspects of life, drove the Cahokian changes that turned a series of farming villages into a polity that in turn affected events across much of the eastern half of North America. The piece of the story that I relate here focuses on what I now term shrine buildings. Vernacular elements were employed in shrine construction, I suggest, to create specifi c affects, which helped people engage the new religious expression developing at Emerald. Through an intentional manipulation of vernacular elements, shrines mitigated tensions between familiar, traditional ways of being and relating in the world with a new religious sensibility that ultimately and profoundly altered human interactions in the U.S. Midwest and U.S. Southeast. Traditionally in Mississippian studies, while religion might be seen as an important component of human existence, and is often called upon to explain what people made or did, religion has not been seen as a creative force that might initiate political and social change. Thus, while Mississippian people are recognized as having built religious structures (mounds) or having engaged in ritual behavior (feasting), these are analytically positioned as the outcomes of other, more politically or economically based motivations and processes (Emer-son et al.

O wls have captured the imaginations of hUman beings for millennia. Owls have often been perceived as otherworldly due fo tneir (typically) nocturnal and solitary habits, their large, watchful eyes, their virtually soundless flight, and their haunting, ventriloquial calls. The ancient'Greeks associated 6wls with Athe=. na, the goddess of wi$.dom (and warfare),. and Athenian coinage exhibited perhaps the best-known artistic r~presentations of owls' frqm the ancient world, The• association of owls with wisdom 'is. occasion" ally found in. other world ~ultures and • persists to this day in some • Western societies: Mr. Owl represented death i(\ a number of ways: as qmens. of d~a. tp. as bringers of death,. as human ghosts or souls, arid as guardians of the path to the aft~rlife. In fact, the connel=tion petween owl$ and de~tt) and the' afterlife is. so common that if may be considered the primarY-symbolic association of owls in native North America. . Stemming fro~\his association with the afterlife; owls were also sometimes linked to r~birth, renewal, and fertility. The use of owl feathers was observed in the Ghost Dance as performed by the Lakota, Ar:ikara, and Arapaho. The purpose of the Ghost.

Assemblage theory, as a way of thinking, has taken hold across the social sciences (following De Landa 2006; Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as social scientists (and others) seek to decenter humans and better account for the emergent and relational qualities of things that populate the world along with human persons. Among other things, assemblages, which are the processes whereby entities "mattered" or came into being, are contributing to a general rethinking of human history, especially when considered alongside the "vibrancy" of materials and the agencies of various other-than-human things, places, and persons, as common to many Native American ontologies (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010). Following the kind of thinking prompted by assemblage theory, I suggest that ancient histories can be enriched, if not also radically altered, when we broaden and reprioritize our views of human history to include other-than-human persons, powers, and forces (Alberti