Abstract
ABSTRACT Efforts were initiated in the mid-1990s to resolve complex questions of context, chronology, and identity of American Indian ancestral sites and individuals in the American Bottom, Illinois. A significant focus was on legacy collections from the Kane Mounds mortuary complex, salvaged in the early 1960s and long interpreted as late Mississippian mortuary mounds related to Cahokia. Drawing on available data from original field records and previously collected analytical evidence, we determined that the mortuary interments at the Kane site were placed in natural bluff-top landforms, not mounds, and that the locale served as a burial location for over a millennium. During this time, people gathered in larger permanent villages, their diet shifted from one based on a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle to one supported by maize agriculture, small groups from the Illinois River Valley emigrated to the area, and mortuary practices became increasingly complex – employing in-the-flesh interments, ossuaries, excarnation, postmortem manipulations of the deceased, and extensive use of fires. The mortuary complex reflects both temporal and geographic diversity as well as the continuity of such ancestral burial places. No depictions of ancestral remains are included in the text. Data presented are derived from legacy sources.
Published Version
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