An American Archaeologist’s Dream… | Illinois
Back in January, my friend – Autumn Melby at the University of Pennsylvania – told me that she needed some help doing her first full-on excavations at her dissertation site this upcoming summer. Autumn and I have been serving on the Southeastern Archaeological Conference’s Student Affairs Committee for the past few years and frequently Zoom across time zones.
At the end of one meeting, she threw around the opportunity and I immediately took it! I’ve been advised to just get as much and as diverse field experience as I can while I’m still in school, and what better way to explore a new place than with a very experienced friend?
Autumn specializes in Mississippian period (800CE – 1600CE) North American archaeology, and her dissertation asks about the everyday lives of rural communities that lived outside of the urban center of Cahokia. More specifically, what reaction do we see among these rural communities after Cahokia’s supposed “collapse” in the late 1300s?
For a quick introduction to Cahokia, check out this video below!
So flash forward to the tail end of the Spring semester: I’m on a plane to St. Louis while wrapping up some final grading and sending off my last few emails before summer break.
Presumably the Missouri River
Y’all – coming from Austin with a humid 85° average, I landed in Missouri at the end of April to it being 40-something° and raining. Having to pack light, I was not prepared for this! Normally fieldwork is super hot and I’m so used to southern weather patterns that I think it’s the same everywhere.
Anywho, I 🎶hopped off the plane at STL🎶, grabbed dinner and a beer, and hit the ground running. Autumn had been there for the past half a week cleaning and setting up the camp that will house everyone and gathering equipment. Groceries were stocked, beds were made, and (most) cobwebs were dismantled. For this first week, there was only three of us until a fourth came a few days later. I could only stay for this first week as I had to be in D.C., so the bulk of the project happened after I left.
You could say that the beginning of fieldwork is the hardest as you’re still working out logistical kinks, running back and forth to the local Rural King for forgotten equipment (and free popcorn), setting up and marking the site grid, and not really working in any kind of routine just yet.
Like I said: abnormally super cold (see sweatshirts). Also, one day was crazy windy and dust went absolutely everywhere.
The goal was to set up a few excavation units over this anomaly that Autumn had discovered in the magnetometer survey she did earlier this year. The anomaly was rectangular-shaped, akin to a footprint of a structure, and her goal was to locate a residence. We shot in the needed corners of the units using the total station, roped off the units, and we were good to start excavation!
Over the weekend or on days that we weren’t in the field, we did some sightseeing! And working at this Cahokia-related site would be entirely incomplete if I didn’t get to visit Cahokia itself!
I’ve been to plenty other mound complexes in the Southeast like Moundville (AL), Poverty Point (LA), and Kolomoki (GA), but Cahokia is the largest given that it was once home to the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico. The largest mound – Monks Mound – was a feat but had an impressive and time-traveling-esque view of which I couldn’t get a photo that did it justice.
Innovatively, the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society had put together this interactive AR app where visitors can scan signs throughout the park and hold up their phones to see how the landscape likely appeared during Cahokia’s golden age. From the top of Monks Mound, you can look over the central plaza and all the potential activities that took place there.
Apart from checking Cahokia off my archaeologist’s bucket list, I got a lot from this trip: mostly in watching Autumn lead the heck out of this project! She had numerous sets of mental to-do lists: from camp/living things, to community contacts and engagements, to excavation-related tasks, to organizing field crew arrivals/departures, to her own wellbeing, and probably a lot more! While she had her friends there to help execute these things, it was a lot to organize and she did it with the utmost grace and compassion in true Autumn style.
