Beaker from Cahokia with finely engraved design.
|
Beaker from Cahokia with finely engraved design. |
Who made the finely crafted pots, delicately pressure-flaked arrowheads, shell beads, copper ear spools, copper staffs, and fireclay pipes found in burial mounds with important people? Did the elite Mississippians employ craft specialists, or could anybody fashion the ornaments? How were exotic goods and materials from outside of the American Bottom acquired? Did Mississippian rulers employ professional traders (like the pochtecas of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican states) to travel to far-off places and bring back canoe loads of marine shell and copper as well as hides and food? Or, were these goods and materials acquired through more pedestrian methods of exchange such gifts between elite and common families alike to solidify marriages or other social agreements? Is this acquisition of exotic materials evidence of Cahokia's powerful influence over other peoples in the eastern Woodlands? Or, does Mississippian trade as expressed in exotic materials from both elite and non-elite contexts represent much the same sort of trade that occurred among Eastern Woodland hunter-gatherers since at least the Late Archaic period? |