00:00.00 connor Welcome back to episode 99 of a life and ruins podcast we are here with Dr Amanda Butler and we wanted to start off this segment by just kind of defining and talking about what is ka hokey I think folks get. Introduced to it in archeology in many classes but just for our listeners. Do you mind talking about what coke is when it occurs and all that kind of stuff. 00:28.10 Amanda Butler Yeah, absolutely and I'm just gonna tell you now please if you have questions or whatever stop me because I I teach this and I get excited about it. So I will go on for ah quite some time but um I guess the basics that. Would like a general public to know about cohokeo would be 1 to know that it exists what it is I think typically what's most exciting about it to at least my students and to me when I learned about cohokeo is that we have this giant. Amazing metropolitan city in the middle of the midwest ah and it gets overlooked right? and there's a whole host of of long-term reasons why that is and we can maybe dig into that in ah in a little next segment. Maybe if we want to, but. Um, that has to do with you know the colonization of this country and why this particular important space gets looked over ah but what it is it. It is a native american city it is ah 1 of the largest and only native american cities north of Mexico which I I think we always hate that. Comparison just because you know those lines don't exist in the past but for just giving the layman what it is that seems to always help figure out the the scope I guess of how big this place was um so where is it. It's in current modern day East St Louis you can actually think of it as 3 precincts so you have cohokia proper which is we call it downtown cohokia that is in East St Louis then you have our sorry in in East St Louis or it's actually near Collinsville today and then East St Louis is the East St Louis Precinct so that section of it and then across the river is the St Louis portion or metropolis part and so all of them together are combined make up the urban center but just like any urban center. It also has suburbs and other rings that come out and so. Great I think what they're calling and now is is greater cohokia so greater cohokeia in and of itself. Um, you know upwards of 30 to 40000 people just the core the metropolis core once you get into greater cohokia which extends I don't remember how many miles out there now defining it. Um. You can get significantly greater population numbers over 150 mounds that is much significant. It's much higher than that but they're all gone from plowing and settler colonialism coming in and completely demolishing these mounds. 03:16.80 Amanda Butler Or Phil so St Louis actually used to be nickname mound city and then when settlers came they used steam shovels and got rid of all of the mounds. So the fact that I think it's the third largest mound in the um. In North America was called big mound and that one is completely gone. In fact, you can still go to the location where it's at and there's a plaque on the sidewalk that says big mound that that's it. That's all that's left. So um, conservation is a real issue at cohokia today. But you can go visit Cokie. They have a wonderful museum. You can kind of walk around and and check things out the big mound monk's mound so this core of the city which what I would identify in my research as the and others was the religious core of the city has monk's mound and monk's mound is. Crazy big. So if you have there's a bunch of of different comparisons that we like to throw out, especially when we're teaching again trying to get the scale of how big this place really is. It's the base of this mound is larger than the base of the keys of pyramid. Um, it's. Huge it's several stories tall and these mounds are specific. So the way that I if I since I don't have a powerpoint to show you pictures of what it would be but they're what we call truncated mounds so they're very specific. So if you think of um, say maya. Ah. Pyramids right? where there ah have the sloping sides and then ah, a flat top. It's the same but it's out of soil right? and remember there are no beast of burden at this time so they're all built by hand by basket load which we can see in the soil and they're. Built and are they're very much constructed in a very particular way. It's not just throwing mounds of dirt onto these places and not everybody lived on those mounds right? There was a hierarchy of of who was able to to be on those mounds but it was just this. Crazy New York way I was we always like to call it kind of the New York city of its time we do have strontium evidence starting isotope evidence that shows that throughout the entire history of of cooko which the time period we're looking at is ten fifty ce to about 1300 ce um, this. It's kind of come. It's very quick right? It's very quick it expands ah really far all the way up to where I'm at so I'm in Minnesota up to Southern Minnesota central minnesota and then Wisconsin and all the way down to the. 06:06.35 Amanda Butler Gulf Coast the influence the ah influence of what we call them which would be the mississippian culture I should have led with that one probably. But. 06:12.93 archpodnet And and like um I've always found it fascinating like how quickly cahokia gets populated like the phases like sterling phase and Loman phase like these things are like 100 years how quickly a lot of these things are happening that you guys are able to identify in the record. But. 06:28.16 Amanda Butler Yeah, so fast. 06:31.40 archpodnet Like there's also palisade walls. There's like wood heinggees evidence for woodhenges around or what are they called? you know what I'm talking. Yeah, the okay. 06:36.60 Amanda Butler Yes, so no, they're called woodhen yeah they call them woodhenges. Yeah, so there's several rebuilt woodhenges to the west of monk's mound and they you know they know they found the the old post holes from them. There. They were. Several iterations and different sizes through time. The palisades come later so you know everything happens very quickly right? So people are moving into the city very quickly. We know that there's a ton of immigrants coming in and out of the city. They have immigrant neighborhoods. We have. Ah, distinctratium isotope evidence that they're moving around or people coming from all over so not everybody would have spoken the same language they definitely would have spoken similar dialects but this was a really truly metropolitan type of melting pot city. Um, but yeah, the the. Palisades come later, they pop up around 1200 so that's when things are starting to kind of change significantly and there's a lot of different factors that are going into that and we have a lot of different ideas and theories about what's going on. But yeah, that's one of the first big pieces of archaeological evidence of. 07:50.95 connor But very cool I I do love the comparison to New York city and I also do love how it's like district wise you have like your Soho. You know you have your upper east side. You know everything is already defined and we kind of see it in that in that sort of terms. So how does something pop up. 07:51.70 Amanda Butler Things changing. 08:10.57 connor And this scale and then go away within two hundred and fifty years of our theories. Why and how it kind of popped up. 08:17.78 Amanda Butler Yeah, um, there's quite a few part of ah the theoretical kind of mode that I am a part of is um, you know and also realizing that humans are complex right? and that we do weird things and. For a variety of reasons and it's never monocausal ever right? There's multitudes of reasons but I always think of things as like a tapestry right? and there's different threads in that tapestry that you can kind of identify as primary parts that make up the bigger picture and for me. 1 of those main threads or the primary threads of why cohokia is religion this new religious movement happens and religious movements all around the world at different times. That's it's actually pretty common. Um. But this new religious movement happens right around ten fifty just slightly a little bit before but part of my research then is like taking that as this understood this foundation of why kookee exists with this new religion. Ah, and then it spreads. So it. It spreads very quickly. Um and part of that is this kind of missionary movement of this bundled religion and these bundled religious practices. But yeah and I think because it's religion and then it's tied to new new ways of existing. So. Everything about cokie was new. Um, you know a lot of things right? new ways of living new ways of organizing yourselves new ways of actually aligning yourself to the cosmos in a completely different way. Ah, all of these things are new. So when you have something so new. And it's a lot of different people. There's probably a variety of different reasons for why things start going south. But um, you know 200 years it's not a bad run pretty them but it doesn't and you know cahoke itself the city changes right? and so this is. Um, teaching a ah kind of ah a class on collapse and so we're problematizing collapse and the coal narrative collapse because you know part of it is maybe cohoko what we're seeing archeologically especially some of the the major collapse narratives is the elite. Right? We the elite are the ones that are affected by collapse narratives the most ah the commoners they just leave they they vote with their feet and leave and mississippian culture doesn't go away like it doesn't disappear people didn't disappear. They moved cohokia changed but cahokia as its. 11:02.49 Amanda Butler As a city as a center. Um, you know there became other centers I think as it moved on. 11:08.95 archpodnet So what was your dissertation exploring related to cohokia. Um because I was I met Dr Pakata when he was the keynote speaker at plains in Bloomington and his whole speak was speech was on cahokee and I got to talk with him after and that's when. When I was talking with him and my advisor he had mentioned that he had been exploring this cato and connection with cahokia and we chatted about my research and and that was the last time I kind of saw him but I've always had that in my mind when Tim when I was talking about what I was saying and he was like smiling and kind of nodding his head and then you show up at planes a couple years later so yeah please for audience. What were you looking at. 11:48.85 Amanda Butler Ah, yeah, so so I am for just knowledge I am Tim Pockat's former student I'm one of his is his I'm a pocketat student. So i. We all as a group there's ah, a group of us that that really feel the data has shown us that there that religion is this causal factor or religion can be this causal factor and so once you instead of previous. Ways of thinking which would be like economic reasons and very much logical kind of precesual still kind of perceptual notes of of still coming in. Um but religion as this cause once you can get to that point then you start for me. The question was always okay, how because. 1 of the things that all of us archeologists recognize who work in the midwest and work in Mississippi and was this mississippian movement. It moves fast and this influence is very quick but it's different all over and so how are you? How do we account for the differences that we're seeing. And all these different places and so they kind of slapped this term called mississippianization on it which implies actually a lot but no one really unpacked that and that really bothered me and so when I started getting into trying to think what my topic was going to be or what I was really interested in. Was like you know I really would like to know how does mississipianization work. What is it like what are we actually talking about because there's an underlying mechanism here that that we're not addressing and so if I'm going to think about mississipianization as a part of because really they wanted to talk about it. Um, they're talking about it in a way of colonization right in a kind of a way they're using. They're using terms like colonies. They're using terms like outposts. Um, but for me what if you put that into religion. What would that do so from there this this is my long Amanda story of getting to the cat up connections. Like I'll get there. So so I was trying to unpack that and think about religion and how religion moves so how does actually religion move and thinking about from these missionary notes or like this idea of missionization missionization and then it came into bundling and how bundled. Um, for bundled thoughts like bundled ideas. How can you bundle ideas and and have those move in this particular way and ah because I was I'd worked at the illinis state archeology survey and Tim was my advisor. 14:31.86 Amanda Butler I also had a really great mentor Tom Emerson who was the former director of the illinois state archeology survey formative a huge name in mississippiian archeology and he he has always had this long interest. In these ideas of the religious aspect of cohokeia the the parts that we really recognize as as religion is might might be coming from these ancestral caoan relationships. So I know he had written a few things with Gerard. Ah, a few years ago and then Tim also because this religion factor came into it. Ah once I started doing my dissertation I was like it has to be this like this is what I'm seeing I'm seeing this pattern I started reading a lot of oral histories and just the oral histories as. Foundational part of this religion and how it moves seems to have these very cadone and or catowin relationships or threads and so I kind of was trying to ah so they're ah a planes a planes group today. They. 15:35.42 archpodnet So and real quick who are the cata wins for the audience. 15:46.70 Amanda Butler Are in Oklahoma and Nebraska they have ancestral homelands um all throughout the the plains and Midwest and south um, they we know that they were ah one of the groups that were part of cooko because again remember cohokia is this multi nation. Type of place. Um, but that that but we don't typically based on archeology and other things for some reason we always think that that ends once they get to the the Missouri River like that influence somehow ends the Missouri river and we we stop talking about them as part of the cohokia. Experience if that makes sense. So yeah, um. 16:31.75 Amanda Butler Ah I don't know what else sorry did I answer your question who are oh yeah, what else are we talking about? there's something else I was gonna that. 16:34.10 archpodnet Dead. Um, getting into getting into the dissertation question like. 16:44.74 Amanda Butler So yeah, yeah, oh yeah, so I was obsessed when I was super pumped to meet Carlton because ah one I know he was working in ah doing it while he is you are pawny but. Fa of the code. 1 of there are several different branches of the kodoan ah nations and the ancestral groups. 1 of them are pawnie and specifically this the skini pony and that was why what? I think and i' I following some other people here and and Tom Emerson being one of them and Tim Pocta being another. Of drawing these connections from ancestral pawny these skitty punny um, the structure of the religion that we see the structural nature of the religious ah evidence that we see at coocia has seems to have these direct lines to ancestral skidty punny. So. Um, that's some type of knowledge keeping happening through time that seems to be really interesting for me as a possible lead to to look at being this foundational part of why cohokia became so big so quickly like were they part of this. Um. The original religious movement right? because again it becomes as you move through these different places all over you're meeting different people different places different other peoples and the archaeological work is going to look different because. Those adoptions are going to look different for how they work through the original religious components of that bundle but they're so similar still underlying and that's the part that everyone recognized as Mississippi andization but because no one was defining it I don't think we really got it. Big question here which I would argue is again where is it coming from and so part of my dissertation was really looking at is it possible that um this original one. How is it moving and where is it coming from and so those were 2 of my big questions and I was. Hypothesizing and wanting to talk to Carlton about working or thinking about pawnee connections to the origin of mississippian religion that is the the point I guess I don't know if I made that right. 19:02.69 archpodnet No, you did it was a lot of fun talking to you about it at like Eleven o'clock at night after a long day it was it was a night. It was a lot of fun and ah. 19:10.69 Amanda Butler I hounded him I just want right over to his table and I was like you don't know me but I have some things I would like to ask you. 19:18.50 connor Can I guess at the context at where this was occurring at Eleven o'clock at night say in a a place where they serve alcohol. Okay I didn't know if it was ah ah. 19:24.11 archpodnet It was still at the hotel. Yeah yeah, there absolutely was. 19:26.91 Amanda Butler There was definitely alcohol. Yeah remember I said I was hiding in the corner trying to find new friends and trying to observe and as like okay I'm ready. 19:39.10 archpodnet Yeah, it was ah it was a lot of fun I really liked your your dissertation and it actually really helped me out recently with ah my prospectus tying a lot of that stuff in so I have a lot of butler 2021 spread out the entire document. So. It was great. So yeah, um, I'm really excited about your research and with that we'll go ahead and um and segment 2 will be right back with Dr Butler on episode Nine nine 19:58.48 Amanda Butler It's so exciting a weird.