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Mississippian Missionaries: Bundling Cahokia with Amanda Butler - Ep 99
584 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Amanda Butler who is an Assistant Professor in the department of anthropology and earth science at Minnesota State University Moorhead. We start off the episode by exploring her educational experiences and background in archaeology. We then delve into Cahokian archaeology and Butler's research regarding the Cahokian religious diaspora. We close out the episode with a chat on the History Channel show: The Curse of Oak Island.
Transcripts
For rough transcript head over to A Life in Ruins Episode 99. (https://archpodnet.squarespace.com/ruins/99)
Links
Literature Recommendations
- Land of Water, City of the Dead: Religion and Cahokia’s Emergence by Sarah E. Baires
- Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 99
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 99 of a life in ruins podcast. Re-investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I am your host Carlton Gover. I am joined by my co-host Connor Jonnan.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Amanda Butler
00:00:24
Speaker
For this week's episode, we are joined by Dr. Amanda Butler, who is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology and earth science at Minnesota state university. More head, Dr. Butler. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. How are you doing this morning?
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm doing okay. That's a Midwestern lie. I'm just hanging on by a thread, but I say I'm okay.
Impressions of Dr. Butler's Conference Presentation
00:00:44
Speaker
Excellent. And so I first met you at this past planes conference in Boulder and I really loved your presentations and your research and what you did for your dissertation and have been very excited to have you on podcast day to talk more about it. So thank you so much for being willing to share that and just kind of kicking us off like what?
00:01:02
Speaker
What were your first experiences in anthropology growing up? Were you a dinosaur kid, history buff, nature nerd? Where did that primary catalyst of inspiration come
Dr. Butler's Early Passion for Archaeology
00:01:11
Speaker
from? Yeah. I'm always a dork. I am a dork. But historically, I always knew that I was going to be an archaeologist. I was one of those rare people that when they asked you what you were going to be, I was going to do archaeology or be the president of the United States. So I always tell my students there's still time for that one.
00:01:29
Speaker
But archaeology is what I wanted to do. In fact, I think my third grade teacher reached out via Facebook to my mom like a couple years ago or this summer when I graduated and said, you did it. You always said you were going to do it and you did it. So that was really nice to see again, to know that it wasn't a lie. But my mom facilitated all of my history nerdery. We went to every museum. We traveled a lot around the country every summer. So I camped a lot. So I was a big outdoor person.
00:01:56
Speaker
Remember those science nature guidebooks about birds and plants and all those? I had all of those. My great aunt was a school teacher and very strong woman. She always took me to any archaeology site that I ever wanted to go to. Whenever we visited her in Arizona, she drove me around to
00:02:19
Speaker
literally all the places. And I did love dinosaurs too, just not as, I mean, that was a phase. But I was always people and history and relationships. I always loved it. Very cool. What part of the country did you grow up in? I started out in Wyoming until I was about in fourth grade. And then we moved back to where my mom grew up, is North Dakota. So I actually grew up for the rest of the time here in North Dakota. Always staying in the frozen North, I guess. I can't escape it.
00:02:49
Speaker
But the nice thing about those is both those places have excellent museums and archaeology and kind of wide open spaces to explore and things like that.
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, there was a canyon behind my house in Wyoming. So I lived in the southwest corner of Wyoming. So the closest place we used to go get groceries was Salt Lake. And we always drove to Salt Lake. We went camping all the time. And whenever we drove north to North Dakota for summers, we would go camping in Yellowstone, et cetera. Yeah, there was this big canyon that I used to go walking. It was a two mile walk.
00:03:24
Speaker
there and back.
Ethical Considerations in Archaeology
00:03:25
Speaker
We'd always find artifacts and leave them where they were, but it was always fascinating to see what was in the canyon. That was my first experience with actual artifacts and weird that I never collected things. I was never a collector. I don't know if you guys ever picked up rocks. Some people pick up rocks, other people pick up. I know other archaeologists that collect things throughout their lives too or the artifacts, but I've never been that person.
00:03:52
Speaker
No, I can't say. I think I maybe like, I pick up courts every now and then, but like nothing crazy, like nothing, nothing that intense. No. Yeah. I got no, I don't have a klepto bone in my body. You know, it's like, I just don't have any, the ability to, uh,
00:04:11
Speaker
think about where I want this in the future and that I need this or need to remove this from this certain place. You know, it just doesn't click for me like that, which makes me makes us great archeologists because we don't have the temptation when we find these stuff in the field that we can just leave it and and or preserve it. Thousand percent. And so it's such a nice thing. It's so weird to find archeologists that have had that past where they were collectors in the past or such a weird thing. But yeah, so Wyoming
00:04:41
Speaker
part of the time hiking. Gotcha. So you lived in Wyoming up until like fourth grade, then you're out in South Dakota. So why did you decide to pursue North Dakota? Is that like a curse word? Is that making them up? Yeah, North Dakota.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I wouldn't want to be associated with Kristi Noem either. So that makes sense. But why MSU Moorhead? How did you get connected there?
Academic Choices and Career Concerns
00:05:11
Speaker
That's a really great question. So I never wavered from my desire to be an archaeologist, but there was only one moment in my mother's support of me where she went, you know, right when we had to start making decisions where she was like, are you going to make any money?
00:05:29
Speaker
is this going to be a career? And she runs part of the North Dakota ITV with long distance education networks. And so she trained herself in Cisco networking. And so she taught that in high school. So I took networking classes as well.
00:05:47
Speaker
And there was the option to also go to school for networking instead. And that was like my one option where I was like, okay, is she right? Should I not do this? And then we went to MSUM because they were the closest regional archaeology program. And it was actually a really amazing
00:06:05
Speaker
deep program here. And so I went and visited and I met one of my mentors and he was so funny and hilarious and I never looked back. I thought he was the best, the absolute best. And then once I was here, I was only archaeology. I was a terrible student, awful student, except in archaeology. I only got A's in archaeology and then I bombed other classes that I just wasn't interested in. I didn't want to take anything other than archaeology.
00:06:34
Speaker
And so I always like to tell my students, you can go and do whatever you want. They will let you do it. If you're interested enough, there's always a way to come back. Grades aren't everything. You can always make it happen kind of thing. And I recognize my privilege in saying that. But yeah, I was such a terrible student until my junior year. And then my junior year, I was like, OK, I'm going to do this for real. And I decided to double major in geology and
00:07:05
Speaker
I met my husband also at the same time. And then we kind of never looked back from that. I was just, I loved being here. The program is amazing. The combination of archaeology and geology is such a unique opportunity that just makes sense. Yeah. I think geoarchaeologists are just straight up dirt wizards. Like the way that they can just read the dirt. And I'm just like, man, that's impressive to have that ability just to kind of see a sidewall and just kind of know its history just by the soil composition. Just bonkers to me.
00:07:35
Speaker
It does sound like wizardry, doesn't it? Yeah, it's like when Guardian Leviosa, okay, I know what this is going on, stuff like that. And it's also for anyone out there listening, you should definitely take a geo-art class as part of anything you do in archaeology, anthropology. It's probably the most important class you'll ever take.
00:07:55
Speaker
I wanted to ask, so obviously like anthropology and geology are related in some sense, but they're also vastly different and one is very hard science and one is what they call a softer science. How did studying both of those go in school?
00:08:13
Speaker
Here, we have this amazing program and two other mentors.
Integration of Archaeology and Geology
00:08:17
Speaker
There were three archaeologists on staff here. One was my mentor who was a paleo-Indian guy for especially upper North Midwest. The other two were Mississippianists. My archaeology experience, I was like everybody else who never really got any type of indigenous histories really in school.
00:08:41
Speaker
I did in Wyoming, actually. I had a lot of Plains history classes in Wyoming. But when I moved to North Dakota, big surprise, like nothing. And so when I went to school, I was still all set on what I call now like the sexy siren archaeology, because it's the one that everyone seems to be drawn to early on, like the classics and Egyptology and things like that. And I was really big into Egyptology, and I thought that was what I was going to do.
00:09:09
Speaker
Then here at MSUM, I met Dr. George Hawley and Dr. Renita Dalen, who had done this huge geophysics survey of Cahokia. They were Cahokianists. I took a Mississippian class from
00:09:29
Speaker
Dr. Holly and Dr. Dalen kind of took me under her wing and she really was my advisor and mentor through this whole process. She's such a badass geoarchaeologist. Like you're talking about wizardry in science. Like that is her with a geophys. She's a wizard, a true wizard. She'd always tell us stories of her geophysics graduate program where she was like using dynamite to do seismic.
00:09:55
Speaker
stuff. She's crazy. I love her. But that was when I was going to do Mississippianness. She was this geoarchaeologist that glued the department together because we have the geology and then the anthropology and then the archaeologists were the glue, but her particularly was the very specific glue that made it make sense. She was teaching geoarchaeology. She was teaching remote sensing. She's teaching all these classes.
00:10:24
Speaker
Now, after my grad career, I would say that, you know, I think the hard science, soft science debate is kind of a moot point to me these days because there's different ways of understanding geology. There's different ways of knowing the Earth, too. And so having one department that combines Earth and people and the history of all of those things, like, just makes sense.
00:10:47
Speaker
So that's where I am now too. And I'm trying to be the glue that keeps us together, which is difficult, but without my mentors. But yeah, I guess, I don't know if I rambled. No, that was great. You didn't ramble. It fit really well for me. They just work. I don't know.
00:11:02
Speaker
Excellent. Now, did you have to double up on courses? Were there overlap in that double major? I was one of the first to... That year, there was two of us that graduated with a georche, so that was the first time they'd created a georcheology emphasis within geosciences.
00:11:18
Speaker
And so there was quite a bit of overlap on the archaeology side. And I'd already taken a ton of geology classes because I was just, they were here and I was interested in them. So I didn't have to take a lot of extra classes. So that worked out. There were a few extra classes in the geoscience that I had to take, that I did not have to take in archaeology, for example. I had to take a stats class and a physics class. So there was some other, yeah, like natural sciences stuff that I had to
00:11:45
Speaker
Right. At my undergraduate institution, intro to geology was one of like the known hardest sciences to take because you had this lecture, lecture twice a week, but then you had a lab with a different professor and you had to at least get a C in the lab to pass the entire course. And that lab was hard. And I just talked with the dude one day and he had his minor in archeology and he had done archeological projects. And when I told him what I was doing, he like helped me out a lot. And I just went to office hours and chatted with him and
00:12:14
Speaker
Got that A, helped me out a lot and very excited to pass that class. I can tell you that it was the exact opposite for me. It was the rocks for jocks course is what it was called. It was like 200 people. It was a 200 people lecture that everyone passed because they wanted, and there was a lot of football players that were sitting in the back, not with headphones, not paying attention, but they would show up and do it. So.
00:12:38
Speaker
It is a similar stereotype. My husband, as I said, I met my husband here and he also graduated, so he's older than me by three years and he graduated first with an archaeology degree from here and then didn't like it. He was actually working for the White Earth nation up here, so the Ojibwe.
00:12:57
Speaker
And they were doing archaeology in that summer and he just didn't want to do archaeology. He was like, this is not me. I want to come back and do geology. So he swapped and he came back. And the year I started is the year he started his second degree. So he went and did the geology degree and I did both, but I went the archaeology route.
00:13:17
Speaker
When he went to grad school, for his TA, he taught what he called rocks for jocks. He would always joke about it. He was always the football player. There's a line of them in the back of the class.
00:13:33
Speaker
It's just, yeah, it was very, very interesting. So after you get your degree, you worked for, you did CRM for a while. We did. Working at, uh, it's the Illinois survey. What is it? Yeah, the Illinois State Archaeology Survey. That one. Yep.
Pre-Graduate Work Experience in Archaeology
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah. And that's where Dr. Pocketot works, right? It is. Yeah. He runs the show now over there, along with a lot of my good friends.
00:13:59
Speaker
Gotcha. So you did, you did that for almost what, like eight, seven years before you started a master's program. And then you went to Urbana Champaign. Yeah. So what led you to want to go for a graduate degree, starting with the MA?
00:14:18
Speaker
Well, so I when I finished here, I both both my husband and I had intended to go to grad school. But, you know, you guys know what this is like when when you love archaeology, you love history. For me, I didn't know what I wanted, since I was also geoarchaeologist. I didn't know where I what my region of interest and particular like my focus was going to be. I wanted to do all of it. And with geoarchaeology, you could write like you can you don't necessarily have to pick a spot.
00:14:48
Speaker
So I was really torn and I kind of really just didn't know. I hadn't done enough yet to really focus. So I had to send out a few applications, but my heart really wasn't in it. And my husband and I actually both got into Akron. They wanted to just, they were just starting a geo-arc program and we had met these two geologists in a field school, a geology field school.
00:15:09
Speaker
And that previous summer and so they were recruiting us and they'd gotten us this package and we're like, okay, well, maybe we'll, maybe we'll just do this. That sounds great. We'll both be in the program. He'll be in the geology one. I'll be G work.
00:15:20
Speaker
And right before we were going to accept, we found out that our future advisors had a restraining order against each other. And we thought that probably wasn't going to be the most effective learning experience, but having us be married and having advisors that were toxic already to begin with. So we ended up
00:15:43
Speaker
Saying no, he got into University of Illinois and I followed him there because I knew I could work at the survey, which was foundational to me figuring out what I wanted to do. It was amazing. So I started out as a lab grunt lab and field. I was such a jerk in the field because I questioned everything. I was such a jerk.
00:16:07
Speaker
I was like, why are we doing things this way? Why do we do it this way? I think I just really wanted to be a boss and I didn't really know it then. At one point, I stopped being in the field and I was lucky enough. If you don't know anything about the Illinois State Archaeology Survey, one, it's amazing. It's one of the biggest, if not the biggest CRM firm in the nation.
00:16:33
Speaker
Being pulled under the State Umbrella Survey is really cool. It comes with its own headaches, I'm sure. Dr. Packetak could tell you all about it. Dr. Emerson before him could tell you all about the hardships of trying to keep that place going.
00:16:51
Speaker
It's amazing because you have all these field stations. So you have the heart, which is on Champaign Urbana, the heart of it. And that's kind of the research arm. So then we have all these field stations throughout Illinois. And I was lucky enough to be able to work full time in the lithics office.
00:17:11
Speaker
So people, we would, they would send their, you know, sites and the materials that everyone else would process them elsewhere. And then I would get to look at them and write them up. So that was when I really got to utilize my geology background quite a bit and kind of find my niche. It was fun.
00:17:28
Speaker
Excellent. And with that, we'll return with a segment two of episode 99 of a life ruins podcast. Stay tuned.
Understanding Cahokia's History and Significance
00:17:34
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 99 of a life and ruins podcast. We are here with Dr. Amanda Butler, and we wanted to start off the segment by just kind of defining and talking about what is Cahokia. I think folks get
00:17:50
Speaker
introduced to it in archaeology in many classes. But just for our listeners, do you mind talking about what Cahokia is when it occurs and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm just going to tell you now, please, if you have questions or whatever, stop me because I teach this and I get excited about it. So I will go on for quite some time. But I guess the basics that I would like a general public to know about Cahokia would be
00:18:20
Speaker
want 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 Cahokia is that we have this giant, amazing metropolitan city
00:18:37
Speaker
in the middle of the Midwest and it gets overlooked. There's a whole host of long-term reasons why that is, and we can maybe dig into that in the next segment maybe if we want to, but that has to do with the colonization of this country and why this particular important space gets looked over. But what is it? It is a Native American city.
00:19:03
Speaker
one of the largest and only Native American cities north of Mexico, which I think we always hate that comparison just because 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 scope, I guess, of how big this place was. So where is it? It's in current modern-day East St. Louis.
00:19:27
Speaker
You can actually think of it as three precincts. So you have Cahokia proper, which is we call it downtown Cahokia. That is in East St. Louis. Then you have, or sorry, 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.
00:19:47
Speaker
Then across the river is the St. Louis portion or Metropolis part. 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. I think what they're calling it now is Greater Cahokia. Greater Cahokia in and of itself, upwards of 30-40,000 people,
00:20:13
Speaker
just the metropolis core. Once you get into greater Cahokia, which extends, I don't remember how many miles out there now defining it, you can get significantly greater population numbers. Over 150 mounds, it's much higher than that, but they're all gone from plowing and settler colonialism coming in and completely demolishing these mounds for
00:20:42
Speaker
The St. Louis actually used to be nicknamed Mound City. Then when settlers came, they used steam shovels and got rid of all of the mounds. In fact, I think it's the third largest mound in North America was called Big Mound. 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's it. That's all that's left.
00:21:09
Speaker
So conservation is a real issue at Cahokia today, but you can go visit Cahokia. They have a wonderful museum. You can kind of walk around and check things out.
00:21:19
Speaker
The big mound, monk's mound, so this core of the city, which I would identify in my research and others, was the religious core of the city, has monk's mound. And monk's mound is crazy big. There's a bunch 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. The base of this mound is larger than the base of the Giza Pyramid.
00:21:46
Speaker
It's huge. It's several stories tall. These mounds are specific. Since I don't have a PowerPoint to show you pictures of what it would be, but they're what we call truncated mounds. They're very specific. If you think of, say, Maya,
00:22:02
Speaker
pyramids, where they have the sloping sides and then a flat top. It's the same, but it's out of soil. Remember, there are no beasts of burden at this time, so they're all built by hand, by basket load, which we can see in the soil.
00:22:19
Speaker
And 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. There was a hierarchy of who was able to be on those mounds. But it was just this crazy New York, as we always like to call it, the New York City of its time. We do have
00:22:42
Speaker
strontium isotope evidence that shows that throughout the entire history of Cahokia, which the time period we're looking at is 1050 CE to about 1300 CE, it's very quick. It expands really far all the way up to where I'm at. I'm in Minnesota, so up to southern Minnesota, central Minnesota.
00:23:09
Speaker
And then Wisconsin and all the way down to the Gulf Coast, the influence, the influence of what we call them, which would be the Mississippian culture. I should have led with that one probably. And like, I've always found it fascinating, like how quickly Cahokia gets populated. Like the phases, like Sterling phase and Lomond phase, like these things are like a hundred years, how quickly a lot of these things are happening that you guys are able to identify in the record.
00:23:35
Speaker
There's also palisade walls. There's wood hinges, evidence for wood hinges around, or what are they called? Yes. They're called wood hinges. They call them wood hinges. There's several rebuilt wood hinges to the west of Monks Mound. They found the old post holes from them. They were several iterations in different sizes through time.
00:23:59
Speaker
The Palisades come later, so everything happens very quickly. 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 distinct stratum isotope evidence that they're moving around or people coming from all over. Not everybody would have spoken the same language. They definitely would have spoken similar dialects.
00:24:23
Speaker
This was a really truly metropolitan type of melting pot city. The Palisades come later. They pop up around 1200. That's when things are starting to change significantly. There's a lot of different factors that are going into that. We have a lot of different ideas and theories about what's going on. That's one of the first big pieces of archaeological evidence of things changing.
00:24:50
Speaker
Very cool. I, I do love the comparison to New York city and I also do love how it's like a 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 in this scale and then go away within 250 years of their theories? Why and how it kind of popped up? Yeah, there's quite a few part of the theoretical
00:25:20
Speaker
kind of mode that I am a part of is, 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 mono causal 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.
00:25:45
Speaker
And for me, one of those main threads or the primary threads of why Cahokia is religion. This new religious movement happens. And religious movements all around the world at different times, it's actually pretty common. But this new religious movement happens right around 1050, just slightly a little bit before. But part of my research then is taking that as this foundation of why Cahokia exists, this new religion.
00:26:15
Speaker
And then it spreads. So it spreads very quickly. 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 Koki was new. You know, a lot of things, right? New ways of living, new ways of organizing yourselves, new ways of
00:26:42
Speaker
actually aligning yourself to the cosmos in a completely different way. All of these things are new.
00:26:49
Speaker
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, you know, 200 years, it's not a bad run, but it doesn't. And, you know, Cahokia itself, the city changes. Right. And so this is I'm teaching a kind of a class on collapse. And so we're problematizing collapse and the whole narrative collapse because
00:27:13
Speaker
Part of it is maybe Cahokia, what we're seeing archaeologically, especially some of the major collapse narratives, is the elite. The elite are the ones that are affected by collapse narratives the most. The commoners, they just leave. They vote with their feet and leave. And Mississippian culture doesn't go away. It doesn't disappear. People didn't disappear. They moved.
00:27:40
Speaker
Cahokia changed, but Cahokia as a city, as a center, you know, there became other centers. And I think as it moved on. So what was your dissertation exploring related to Cahokia?
Dr. Butler's Research on Cahokia
00:27:54
Speaker
Because I met Dr. Paketot when he was the keynote speaker at Plains in Bloomington, and his whole speech was on Cahokia, and I got to talk with him after. And that's when I was talking with him and my advisor, he had mentioned that he had been exploring this Katoan connection with Cahokia.
00:28:10
Speaker
and we chatted about my research 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 seeing and he was like smiling and kind of nodding his head and then you show up at planes a couple of years later. So yeah, please for audience, what were you looking at?
00:28:30
Speaker
So I'm, for just knowledge, I am Tim Pacatat's former student. I'm one of his, I'm a Pacatat student. So we all as a group, there's a group of us that really feel the data has shown us that religion is this causal factor or religion can be this causal factor.
00:28:52
Speaker
Instead of previous ways of thinking, which would be economic reasons and very much logical, still kind of perceptual notes of still coming in, but religion as this cause, once you can get to that point, then you start, for me, the question was always, okay, how? Because one of the things that all of us archaeologists recognize who work in the Midwest and work in Mississippian was
00:29:19
Speaker
This Mississippian movement, it moves fast. And this influence is very quick, but it's different all over. And so how do we account for the differences that we're seeing in all these different places? And so they kind of slapped this term called Mississippianization.
00:29:35
Speaker
on it, right? 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, I was like, you know, I really would like to know how does Mississippianization work? What is it? What are we actually talking about? Because there's an underlying mechanism here that we're not addressing. And so if I'm going to think about Mississippianization as a part of
00:30:04
Speaker
Because really, they wanted to talk about it. They're talking about it in a way of colonization, right? In a kind of a way. They're using terms like colonies. They're using terms like outposts. But for me, what if you put that into religion? What would that do? So from there, this is my long Amanda story of getting to the cat-up connections. I'll get there. So I was trying to unpack that and think about religion and how religion moves.
00:30:32
Speaker
So how does actually religion move? And thinking about from these missionary notes or this idea of missionization, and then it came into bundling and how bundled thoughts, like bundled ideas, how can you bundle ideas and have those move in this particular way? And because I worked at the Illinois State Archaeology Survey and Tim was my advisor, I also had a really great mentor, Tom Emerson, who was the former
00:31:00
Speaker
director of the Illinois State Archaeology Survey. Formative, huge name in Mississippian archaeology. And he has always had this long interest
00:31:12
Speaker
in these ideas of the religious aspect of Cahokia, the parks that we really recognize as religion might be coming from these ancestral Caddoan relationships. So he had written a few things with Gerard a few years ago, and then Tim, also because this religion factor, came into it. Once I started doing my dissertation, I was like, it has to be this. This is what I'm seeing. I'm seeing this pattern. I started reading a lot of oral histories
00:31:42
Speaker
And just the oral histories as the foundational part of this religion and how it moves seems to have these very Caddoan relationships or threads. And real quick, who are the Caddoans for the audience?
00:31:56
Speaker
So they have a Plains group today. They are in Oklahoma, Nebraska. They have ancestral homelands all throughout the Plains and Midwest and South. We know that they were one of the groups that were part of Cahokia because, again, remember, Cahokia is this multi-nation type of place. But we don't typically
00:32:22
Speaker
based on archaeology and other things, for some reason we always think that that ends once they get to the Missouri River, like that influence somehow.
00:32:30
Speaker
ends at the Missouri River and we stop talking about them as part of the Cahokia experience, if that makes sense. So I was obsessed when I was super pumped to meet Carlton because one, I know he was working in, well he is, you are Pawnee, but one of the, there are several different branches of the Cudoan nations and the ancestral groups, one of them are Pawnee.
00:32:56
Speaker
and specifically the Skidipani. And that was what I think, and I'm following some other people here, and Tom Emerson being one of them, and Tim Pocktapp being another, of drawing these connections from ancestral Pani, the Skidipani, the structure of the religion that we see, the structural nature of the religious evidence that we see at Cahokia,
00:33:20
Speaker
seems to have these direct lines to ancestral skinny punny. There's some type of knowledge keeping happening through time that seems to be really interesting for me as a possible lead to look at being this foundational part of why Cahokia became so big so quickly. Were they part of this
00:33:39
Speaker
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 gonna look different because those adoptions are gonna 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 recognizes Mississippianization, but because no one was defining it, I don't think we really got it.
00:34:09
Speaker
The big question here, which I would argue is again, where is it coming from?
00:34:14
Speaker
And so part of my dissertation was really looking at, is it possible that this original one, how is it moving and where is it coming from? And so those were two 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 was the point, I guess. And I don't know if I made that right.
00:34:40
Speaker
No, you did. It was a lot of fun talking to you about it at like 11 o'clock at night after a long day. It was a night. It was a lot of fun. I hounded him. I just went 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. Can I guess at the context at where this was occurring at 11 o'clock at night, say in a place where they serve alcohol? I didn't know if it was there. There was definitely alcohol.
00:35:08
Speaker
There absolutely was. Remember I said I was hiding in the corner trying to find new friends and trying to observe and I was like, okay, I'm ready. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I really liked your dissertation and it actually really helped me out recently with my prospectus tying a lot of that stuff in. So I have a lot of Butler 2021 spread out the entire document.
00:35:32
Speaker
So it was great. So yeah, I'm really excited about your research. And with that, we'll go ahead and end segment two. We'll be right back with Dr. Butler on episode 99. And welcome back to episode 99. We are still here with Dr. Amanda Butler. And for this segment, we're going to be getting into some pseudo-archaeology television, some trash TV, as you will.
Guilty Pleasures and Archaeology in Media
00:35:54
Speaker
And in the green room earlier, you were talking about
00:35:57
Speaker
The Curse of Oak Island and that you have a guilty pleasure for that show. I don't think we've ever talked about Curse of Oak Island here. Ancient Aliens comes up a lot. Whatever Megan Fox's horrible archeology show is has popped up once or twice. But so what is it about The Curse of Oak Island? So, you know, I'm human and I love trashy shows like anybody else, especially big train wrecks. But from when I was a kid, I loved mysteries, too. Right. I was obsessed. You know, we talked about dinosaurs. I was obsessed the Loch Ness Monster for, I think, way too long.
00:36:26
Speaker
then I probably should have been, but...
00:36:29
Speaker
I love them, and Oak Island was actually one of the mysteries that I was obsessed with when I was little. I always thought it was pirate treasure that was buried, and it's definitely pirate booby traps on this island. And so when they did this show, you know, now as an adult, as an archeologist, I had high hopes for it, and of course they let me down. But it's interesting. I think it's, I show several episodes of this,
00:36:58
Speaker
particular one in class. I don't know. Have you guys watched it?
00:37:02
Speaker
I remember when it first came out, but I could never really get into it because it was just so slow. And it's just, there's always water that they can never seem to get rid of. And I don't know how you can make seven seasons of guys just trying to pump out a well. And it's, it's interesting. Yeah. I feel like I listened to like, or watched a couple episodes in the middle of it and they're like, we are 30 feet down and we're finding stuff. And I'm like,
00:37:32
Speaker
I need a lot more context to understand how you got to this point. So I never really gave it a chance. They're like... Oh man, you guys are missing out.
00:37:42
Speaker
You're missing out. Let me just tell you. So this one, it's this evolutionary process of what it's like for, I think, a general public who is very monetarily oriented. They're after treasure, right? Very specific goal here. They are after treasure. They did not receive or need any archaeological permits to excavate. One, they bought the whole island. So they own
00:38:06
Speaker
the whole island. These two brothers, one is an engineering dude who's a millionaire engineering firm, and his big brother who's always been obsessed with Oak Island. He was a postmaster his whole life. He was just a postman. The little brother was like, I'm going to make my big brother's dream come true. We're going to go do this and we're going to find the treasure. They didn't have to have permits because it was private land and it had been
00:38:32
Speaker
completely trashed this whole area where the money pit supposedly was. It had been so trashed from decades upon decades, actually 100 years or more of digging, looking for this treasure. Archaeology wasn't really in their purview. Then these things started getting weird. They started finding things outside because they were always water everywhere because they're just putting pipes. They're just drilling.
00:38:58
Speaker
into the ground and be like, oh man, where are we going to find pipe water? Oh, we found this piece of wood. Is it searcher tunnel or old searcher tunnel? And so what was interesting right off is even though archaeology wasn't on their mind, they were very interested in making sure it was scientifically sound. So they would send off, they would try to find experts to look at their stuff and tell them
00:39:21
Speaker
dates wise, right? So at least they were bringing in scientists. Now, at some point they started looking elsewhere beyond the money pit and they realized there's a lot of other things happening on this island and that's when they were forced to bring on an archaeologist. And that was a real contentious relationship on camera. They're like, ah, grumble, grumble archaeology. And so pseudo archaeology, it was the same as any other show, right? Where they pit the public against the archaeologist as, you know, some gatekeeper of knowledge and
00:39:50
Speaker
secret knowledge that we all keep from everybody on the council. It ended up being this really interesting relationship. They're on season nine now, and legit, they're finding stuff. They actually had five or six archaeologists on staff this last season because they are finding things in the 1400s. They have a 1400
00:40:13
Speaker
It's crazy. They have legit found this whole place is an archaeological site. There's definitely an old ship worth there from the late 1400s, early 1500s. Yeah, they found a lot. There's more than just whatever this treasure is, is interesting. But then they had to fire their archaeologists.
00:40:34
Speaker
So Oak Island is an island off of Nova Scotia and Canada. So it's like way up Northeast. So that dock you're talking about, is it like a Danish Viking origin?
00:40:45
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Well, so their dates are wildly weird. So they have medieval dates of some lead artifacts, you know, like 1100 dates, but that, you know, if they were coming on ships or part of old parts of treasure or whatever, then that makes sense. They're, you know, they're coming from somewhere older over there. But I think 1500s is the earliest of like solid grouping of dates that they have for
00:41:10
Speaker
these ship pieces and they have pieces of ships that they're digging out of this big swamp. But in the swamp, they excavated this huge stone paved roadway and it had huge word things. They're like metal spikes with hoops in them. They're called something and I can't think of what they're called. But they were meant to pull heavy things up and over this road.
00:41:39
Speaker
Right. So like to drag them. Yeah. And so they have that and they ended up having to stop because below one of these levels they did. They finally ran into Mi'kmaq.
00:41:51
Speaker
are pottery. And so then they got the kibosh put on them and they had, well, they made it sound like, you know, the bad archeologists are making them stop. And especially pitting them against indigenous nations, First Nations in Canada, making them look really awful, the Oak Island people. And they just decided to be angry about it. And instead of working through this really complex archeological conversation that a lot of people have to have,
00:42:19
Speaker
they ignored it, shut that whole part down on the island and are now back to just digging in the money pit for the treasure. And like this whole thing is bonkers because like the theories behind the treasure is for like Knight's Templar, Aztec gold, like just this cool. You're hitting all that, you're checking them all. Yeah, it's like, and people like you've been saying have been excavating there for years and like, do you, where's
00:42:44
Speaker
where did the origin of this tiny island in Nova Scotia having this mystical treasure? I know. Like, why? Why this island? And the thing is, is they keep finding stuff that's like, it's seriously legitimately confusing. I mean, they have a lead seal that they just dated to the
00:43:07
Speaker
1500s, I want to say, that's from the English crown that they put on large bales of cotton or bales of large goods. It's a lead seal with a stamp in it that they just found. It just makes no sense. In the tunnel where this treasure is, they've dug up wood that dates to the 1300s.
00:43:36
Speaker
Again, that's waterlogged, so you're gonna have water issues, but of course they don't explain any of those. But yeah, it's just, from an archeological standpoint, it's one of the more interesting trash TV shows out there for me, because I love to hate it. And I'm legitimately intrigued with everything that they keep bringing up, because you're like, oh my God, they keep bringing on these crackpot theorists for the Knights Templar. But then they found a lead,
00:44:05
Speaker
cross that they not only dated, but then they did sourcing of where the lead came from. And it came from the south of France. I don't know. So do you think it's, is it a, they're not working with archaeologists and only releasing small amounts of data so it may look complex or is it really just that weird and strange? Because I feel like
00:44:33
Speaker
That's part of archaeology is this contextualizing multiple researchers, people working and trying to ask different questions. But if you just start digging and you find just a random artifact isolated by itself in some waterlogged hole that you created, you need those other bits and pieces around it to understand what's really going on. Do you think it's just that complex or are they just not doing it right?
00:44:59
Speaker
I legit can't have a real opinion about that because I don't know what the searcher pit area where they're treasure hunting. That is just a whole pile of crazy. I mean, there's a bunch of
00:45:14
Speaker
old digger tunnels. Other searchers have died looking for this drowning in those deep holes that they've made themselves. They have pulled up some really interesting stuff, but I think what's interesting on the archaeological side for me is that outside of the searcher pit.
00:45:31
Speaker
Ignoring the treasure, right? Which is hard for the people who are interested in this show. The archaeology is legit. And I think that that is what surprised all the archaeologists that they brought on was they realized they had
00:45:46
Speaker
in situ, real contextual archaeological history that shouldn't be there according to all their historic documents. There's nothing that should be there. And yet they have real archaeological data popping up at various parts around the island. So to your question specifically, I'm not sure if they're releasing all of that information, especially those stuff that archaeologists are doing.
00:46:09
Speaker
because it's going to be a lot slower. So I'm not sure. But the archaeologists were also seriously confounding when that roadway popped up. And they're finding ox shoes along that road. So they're hauling stuff, big stuff. And it shouldn't be there. To them and their historic knowledge, it shouldn't be there.
00:46:29
Speaker
I think it's like going to kind of go into the context. People have been looking for this gold since like the early 1790s. So that immediate area around the money pit has just like all contexts is lost. But I wonder if like part of that is, you know, we know in New England, the East coast looting was rampant.
00:46:48
Speaker
of mounds. Part of me thinks, because people thought there was a treasure in this spot, they left the landscape alone. Now, when they brought archaeologists and start working outside the money pit and they're like, wait a second, it's because looters were digging in the money pit, that's what they thought the treasure was. They didn't need to go anywhere else.
00:47:07
Speaker
and everything just kind of as an offshoot of this crazy story. But like one dude who supposedly sailed with Captain Kidd and like that's where Captain Kidd buried the treasure. Like it just keeps going. The levels of that you have to get in here is just coconut fiber. That's the one that for the pirate theory, like they found coconut fiber along the beach areas and like like impact in different spaces. So it's just things that shouldn't exist do on on Oak Island. I don't know. Maybe it's
00:47:36
Speaker
I don't know, maybe it's a realm, a spinning between the realms, who knows. But that one is my, that's my current fave that I'm my guilty pleasure that I watch. I did binge watch because I'm in Minnesota and we have the Kensington Runestone so close by.
Pseudo-Archaeology and Myths
00:47:55
Speaker
And I have a lot of people who bring that discussion to me a lot or Viking swords and all that crazy. I did watch one. Do you guys remember it? So the movie Fargo, the guy that fed his friend to the wood chipper,
00:48:11
Speaker
That guy? Yeah. So he became the actor, became obsessed because of his time here filming Fargo, became obsessed with the Kensington Runestone. And he decided that he was with some random local dude from Minnesota, him and this guy, they were going to solve the mystery of the Kensington Runestone.
00:48:32
Speaker
And now I'd forget what it's called if it's called like the Viking Runestone. It just came out last year, but I ended up buying, I hate giving my money, but I had to. I tell myself it's for educational purposes. I watched the whole thing and it was awful, right? And all of the weird things. And they also have this guy, if you guys come across in all of your trash TV shows, Scott Walter, have you heard that name? He calls himself Scott Walter.
00:48:58
Speaker
He had his own show called America Unearthed. And he calls himself a forensic geologist. So that's the title that he gives himself. He is a forensic geologist, which is not real. But that's what he calls himself. And I showed the third episode of the first season to my students when we do our Sudork because it's local. He brings them out here and talks to local farmers who think that archaeologists are keeping the truth of Vikings
00:49:28
Speaker
and Viking history here. And so we talk about it in class about how those types of narratives, especially in places like this, you know, you can make sense of it from this immigrant perspective, sure. But understand that you are erasing real people's history here and you are negating an entire culture that is not yours. And he does it. He brings in the Rinstone. He brings in everything. And this new series that I was watching, the Viking Rinstone, he becomes really best friends with this two duo group that are
00:49:58
Speaker
doing this whole thing. And he brings in the, then he connects the Knights Templar. I don't know why is everyone going to connect the Knights Templar? What is it? So it's called Secrets of the Viking Stone. 12 episodes. I think I'm going to have to start watching that, but even down it, I've seen it even in Northern Oklahoma.
00:50:17
Speaker
where people talk about how Vikings got to Northern Oklahoma. But you look back at the immigrant history and like who's dominating, especially the Great Lakes region, the Dakotas in Nebraska, and it's like Eastern Europeans, Scandinavians especially, and they're bringing that with them. And then the Viking Runestone is a known fake. A known fraud.
00:50:40
Speaker
Yeah, I know, right. Well, yeah, the archaeologists are the ones telling me. So yeah, it's been tested a billion times in different, you know, a bunch of different ways. And of course, the Scott Walter, this forensic geologist, he was given access to it years ago to to test. And of course, he his tests and then claim that it's it's real. And this is why I hate how science is used as a weapon a lot, especially to lay people who don't understand it.
00:51:10
Speaker
because I call it science with a big S. They make it sound very technical and scary, and then people will just believe what you say because, well, I mean, I guess it depends on what you're saying. If it's something else, maybe they don't care about it. This in particular, yeah, if science with a big S sounds very technical about mica and all kinds of things of leaving or being
00:51:32
Speaker
washed out and that's how you can tell it's real. But it's been tested. And the one thing I will say about this particular show is they brought on and let real archaeologists speak extensively and counter every single point, whether or not the public listens to that. So more so than any other shows, they brought on my mentor, Mike McClovick. He was on there.
00:51:54
Speaker
They had quite a few actual people, but there was a Swedish interpreter, Swedish language expert, and he read the rune stone. And he's like, regardless of if the stone itself is real or the carvings are real, what's written is modern Swedish. So the ruins of what they're actually depicting is modern Swedish. So it's not real. It doesn't matter what you're testing the stone and all of that.
00:52:19
Speaker
It's modern Swedish. That's amazing. That's wild. Oh boy. Well, you know, before we end the show today, Amanda, what are a couple of sources? These will be books, articles, videos that you would recommend for anyone interested in Cahokia.
Recommended Resources on Cahokia
00:52:35
Speaker
And we'll throw links to some of this Kensington Runestone stuff and Curse of Oak Island for anyone interested. But what about Cahokia? Where can our listeners find out more about Cahokia?
00:52:46
Speaker
I think it's an overwhelming amount of information, and so some of my favorite ones to check out, especially... So one is my really great friend and colleague, Sarah Bydrez. She produced a book called Land of Water, City, the Dead, Religion, and Cahokia's Emergence. That one's going to be more of an academic kind of... It's good for anybody, but it is going to be more in the academic world.
00:53:11
Speaker
But I think it really does a great job of highlighting religion as this causal factor for really driving Cahokia's emergence. And then, of course, my good old advisor, Timothy Bhagatat, one of his most, I think, highly read books because it is so easy for anybody to understand. It's just your basic
00:53:30
Speaker
I don't know anything about Cahokia, tell me about it, book. Cahokia, Ancient America's great city on the Mississippi, that's a really great one. And then also I just wanted to throw out PBS's Native America. It's just a really great documentary on, it connects a lot of other really great cities and sites throughout North America, but it does especially episode three highlight Cahokia and Cahokia's religious importance or the dominance of religion at Cahokia.
00:53:59
Speaker
So those would be my three go-tos. All right. And well, David's not here. So where could our listeners find you on social media?
Contact Information for Dr. Butler
00:54:07
Speaker
So it was such a great question that you asked me cause I was like, man, I'm actually kind of really private. I didn't really do it. I didn't really work on that. Uh, I do have a public Twitter that I use not very well, but I'm trying to get better at that. So if you wanted to reach out via the social media at me or whatever, you can find me at, at Arcio Joe's and on Twitter. And then just through basic email, Amanda dot Butler at mnstate.edu. Love to hear from anybody. If you have questions, don't, don't be shy.
00:54:35
Speaker
Sweet. And we'll have the Twitter handle and the email and the episode description, whatever platform you're listening to this episode. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely. And because this is a life in ruins, we have to ask you the question. If you were given the chance to do it again, would you still choose to live a life in ruins? A thousand percent. Yeah.
00:54:57
Speaker
Never look back. Excellent. Well, everyone, we just interviewed Dr. Amanda Butler. You can find her on Twitter at archaeojoes and by email amanda.butler at mnstate.edu. Please be sure to rate and review the podcast and provide us with any feedback, whichever podcasting platform you're using to listen to our show. Remember, if you leave us a review on iTunes,
00:55:15
Speaker
and email us letting us know you left to review. We will send you stickers. We have succumbed to bribes. So please, please rate and review. And we look forward to the next episode. Spotify now has a place to review and rate stuff too now. So please do that on Spotify. Yeah, they didn't have that before, but they do have it now. So please, please, please send it to David and overwhelm him with the amount of stickers that he will have to send out or Carlton.
00:55:41
Speaker
Yeah, either or I'm trying to see what was the last our latest review. Let's see if it's changed. If it hasn't changed and be upset, guys, it's still the same one. I'm pretty sure. Yeah.
00:55:52
Speaker
We're not mad. We're just disappointed. We are just disappointed. I'm looking on Spotify. I'm not even on iTunes. Why can't I even pull it up? And the reason being, because I'm an idiot. So on January 25th, we have a review. This has such a great show. Very knowledgeable yet relaxed. It's always interesting to see what the guest brings to the table. And I'm always blown away, inspired and inspired. You're getting me through my aunt's degree.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yes, so thank you, phenomenal. And reach out to us to get your free sticker. And that was just the title of the thing. The username is J M Joe. Oh, I can't read either. Oh, I see it. Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. All right. And with that, we are truly out.
00:56:43
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. All right, Connor, it's it's that time. This one is particularly bad. So you know what they say? It takes guts to be an organ donor.
00:57:15
Speaker
thank you very much and uh yep thank you all right and with that we are out
00:57:32
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.