Timothy Pauketat
Timothy R. Pauketat is an American
Early life and education
Pauketat was exposed to archaeology at an early age, growing up amid family heirlooms and Native artifacts scattered about his family's property. Early on, he met Brad Koldehoff, who was similarly exposed to archaeology while growing up on the other side of their home town of Millstadt, Illinois. In high school, he took an art class from Al Meyer, a veteran of the Mound 72 excavations at Cahokia. Pauketat's enthusiasm for archaeology grew. A few years later, Pauketat attended
Pauketat earned an M.A. in Anthropology from SIU-Carbondale in 1986 and then left for the University of Michigan to pursue his doctorate. At Michigan, Pauketat worked with Professors Henry Wright, Richard Ford, John O'Shea, and Jeff Parsons, and teamed up with then-students Preston Miracle, Andrew Darling, Alex Barker, David Anderson, and John Robb. A particularly memorable field encounter that he, Preston Miracle, and David Anderson had with the "dark forces" of American capitalism in 1987 is recorded in his 2007 book Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions.[1] He earned his PhD in Anthropology in 1991.
Academic career
Pauketat did a one-year post-doc at the
The years between the mid 1990s and the mid 2010s were filled with field work, field schools, and laboratory study. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation, Pauketat led excavations at a series of endangered archaeological sites on the margins of Greater Cahokia, including the Halliday, Pfeffer, Grossmann, and Emerald Acropolis sites. Up until 2019, he regularly taught classes such as “Introductory World Archaeology” and “Archaeological Theory".[2] He also led the annual University of Illinois archaeological field school for 17 out of the 20 years that his primary appointment was with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois.[4] In 2019, he assumed the role of the Director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS), a subdivision of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois. As Director, he oversees the research and compliance archaeology of upwards of 100 staff and is engaged in transforming the research and engagement activities of ISAS, the largest archaeological organization of its kind in the U.S.
Pauketat is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the archaeology journal Antiquity.[5]
Research
Cahokia
Pauketat has concentrated his own research on Cahokia, an Indigenous city at the center of a large, regional Mississippian culture that extended its influence up and down the Mississippi Valley and across its tributaries. He has excavated in Cahokia's grand plaza and surrounding settlements and platform mounds.[1] He has also worked at outlying sites such as Halliday, Pfeffer, and Emerald in the uplands of the Mississippi valley.[6] He ranks Cahokia as the prime society in the Mississippian world.[7] The finding of similar mundane and ritual implements such as pottery, chunkey stones, and Mississippian stone statuary in locations as far afield as sites such as Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma, and the presence of resources from distant locales such as the Gulf of Mexico at Cahokia, show the extent of Cahokia's historical and political connections to the greater Mississippian world. He has entangled this spread of Cahokian material culture with the effects of a pax Cahokiana, all of which contributed to Cahokia's far-reaching influence.[8]
Pauketat has used research from contemporaneous archaeological sites to formulate a comprehensive, large-scale picture of the Mississippian world. He is interested in investigating such questions as the emergence of civilization, especially as we might imagine that today to have involved human and other-than-human forces. He has investigated culture areas beyond the Mississippian heartland to define what he once called his "historical processual" approach. Today, that approach has been extended to draw on New Materialist theories and a variety of ontological or relational approaches to history and humanity.
Whatever the theoretical underpinnings, Pauketat has always relied on hard data and artifacts to discover new or previously ignored information. Doing so led him to an early reconstruction of Cahokian urban history as beginning around A.D. 1050, when pre-Cahokian settlements were suddenly transformed into the large, planned community of Cahokia proper, marked by a sudden preponderance of houses and the rapid adoption of wall-trench housing that replaced the previously common post-wall housing. Also during this time, a distinctive pattern of
Pauketat and his colleagues noticed a great amount of artifact diversity among Richland sites, including some non-local pottery styles (“Varney Red Filmed”), and pottery-making methods of the local style (shell-tempered) that differed from the norm (thicker walls, etc.) These villages have fewer finely crafted items or ritual objects and a high percentage of workshop debris, likely indicating their purpose as support communities for the Cahokian elite. His notion of a transplanted farmer population is supported by the complete abandonment of these upland villages at the same time of Cahokia’s presumed collapse around two centuries later.[6]
Pauketat questions established knowledge about ancient North America. For instance, due to improvements in
Cultural Resource Management
Due to the nature of American archaeology, Pauketat participated in “salvage” or cultural resource management early on. This archaeology removes and documents cultural material before modern development destroys it. Today, he leads the largest rescue-archaeology or cultural resource management organization in the United States. Though often much more limited in scope and time than academic archaeology, Pauketat's book, The Ascent of Chiefs..., details how artifacts in part “salvaged” from the construction of a highway through Cahokia can be used to achieve the highest kind of intellectual knowledge production. Dividing up the artifacts by radiometrically dated and ceramic-seriated phases, he noted an increasing number of foreign goods as time progressed during the pre-Cahokian era. In that study, he interpreted this pattern to suggest the emergence of a new subcommunity or class of elites. [10]
Theoretical Foundations
In an interview with Peter Shea in 2013, Pauketat characterized his work as being about objects and their relationships to people. He insisted on the importance of research into materials as the only way to understand people and their histories, if not humanity itself. While respectful of the work of historians, he yet asserts that the written record misses important aspects of the human history. He says that understanding history means exploring the materiality of the past. He describes his approach to the past as being "object heavy."[11] More recently, in a series of lectures, he has emphasized the importance of the archaeology of the intangible.
Processualism
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Pauketat championed practice-based, agency-focused, and phenomenological theories in archaeology, initiated as part of the post-processual movement in the 1980s and 1990s. These theories culminated in his 2007 book, Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions.[1] Post-processual theory was a critique of processual archaeology, sometimes associated by critics with postmodernism. Today, the distinction is disappearing, as all archaeologists use the scientific method for basic inference construction. Theories of identity, landscape phenomenology, and agency are now central to 21st-century explanations of the past.[12]
Practice Theory
Pauketat advocates a more historical approach to theory and a more theoretical approach to history.[13]
With regard to Cahokia, Pauketat used practice theory to interpret the proliferation of the
Recent work
After 2008, Pauketat turned to rethink religion and agency in human history, often through the lens of archaeoastronomy. Between 2009 and 2011, he worked with Danielle Benden and Robert Boszhardt (independent) to lead "The Mississippian Initiative" (funded by the National Science Foundation). The trio investigated sites in western Wisconsin at sites including the Fisher Mounds Site Complex and
Between 2012 and 2018, Pauketat worked with Susan Alt (Indiana University, Bloomington) on an even larger-scale investigation of upland "shrine complexes" due east of Cahokia. Over five intensive field seasons, Alt and Pauketat's teams undercovered evidence of periodic, large-scale religious events at a place dubbed the "Emerald Acropolis." Here, Pauketat verified his claims that Cahokian religion was centered on the long 18.6-year cycle of the Moon, drawing inspiration from colleagues at Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, and the Hopewell sites of central Ohio. Since then, Alt and Pauketat have sought to understand the relationship between religion to politics generally, at sites in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Indiana, and Illinois. Like most pre-modern religions, those of precolonial America were practiced through rituals and events. Pauketat is seeking to understand the larger historical implications of such performed religion. He discusses this and other theories about Cahokia's connections and influence in his Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (2009). In an early review of this work, Pauketat's old mentor, William I. Woods, took issue with Pauketat's suggestion (on page 2) that Cahokia may have been in contact with Mesoamerican civilizations, and to his belief that they have important similarities in mythic images and religious beliefs. Woods notes that James B. Griffin, "the dean of Eastern North American archaeology," repeatedly stated that there was "absolutely no evidence for direct contact between Mesoamerica and Cahokia."[15] C. Wesson says that Pauketat presents this theory but is not committed to proving a connection between Cahokia and ancient Mexico; rather it is one of several alternatives that he explores to provide an overview of the field.[16]
Pauketat's An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America was published in 2013. The previous year he also edited the volume, The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology (2012). Since then, several other volumes of his have been published. Most recently, Pauketat has written an extended treatment of the big history of North America that includes the effects of both Medieval climate change and Mesoamerica on the rest of North America. His latest book is Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial North America (2023).
References
- ^ a b c Pauketat, Timothy R. (2007) Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions Alta Mira Press
- ^ a b http://www.anthro.uiuc.edu/faculty/pauketat/pauketatCV.doc [dead link]
- ^ Timothy Pauketat, Anthropology, U of I Archived 2008-12-03 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Field School in Archaeology, Anthropology, U of I
- ^ "Editorial Advisory Board". Antiquity. Retrieved August 14, 2023.
- ^ a b Pauketat, Timothy R. (2003), “Resettled Farmers and the Making of a Mississippian Polity", American Antiquity Vol. 68 No. 1
- ^ Pauketat, Timothy R. (1994) The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America, University of Alabama Press
- ^ a b Pauketat, Timothy R. (2005) “The History of the Mississippians", in North American Archaeology, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
- ^ Pauketat, Timothy R. (1998) “Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia”, Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 6 No. 1
- ^ Pauketat, Timothy R. (1994) The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America University of Alabama Press.
- ^ Victorin-Vangerud, Aaron (May 1, 2013). "Tim Pauketat, 5/1/13". Institute for Advanced Study. Archived from the original on May 2, 2016.
- ^ Trigger, Bruce G. (2003) “Neoevolutionism and the New Archaeology", in A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge University Press. 12th Printing
- ^ a b c Pauketat, Timothy R. (2001a) “Practice and History in Archaeology: an Emerging Paradigm", Anthropological Theory Vol. 1, No. 73
- ^ Pauketat, Timothy R. (2001) “A New Tradition in Archaeology", in The Archaeology of Traditions ed. Pauketat, Timothy R. University Press of Florida
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Selected works
- (2023) Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America, Oxford University Press.
- (2013) An Archaeology of the Cosmos, Routledge Press.
- (2012) Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology., ed. by Timothy Pauketat, Oxford University Press
- (2009) Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi. Viking Adult.
- (2007) Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. Alta Mira Press.
- (2004) Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians. Cambridge University Press.
- (2001) “Practice and History in Archaeology: an Emerging Paradigm", Anthropological Theory Vol. 1, No. 73
- (1998) “Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia", Journal of Archaeological Research Vol. 6 No. 1
- (1994) The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America, University of Alabama Press.
Pauketat, Timothy R. and Alt, Susan M.
- (2005) “Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making", in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 12 No. 3
External links
- Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site
- "Timothy Pauketat" at Directory Profile | Department of Anthropology | UIUC