Results by title

A necessary reexamination of Indigenous mounds, demonstrating their sustained vitality and vibrant futurity by centering Native voices
 

Typically represented as unsolved mysteries or ruins of a tragic past, Indigenous mounds have long been marginalized and misunderstood. In Earthworks Rising, Chadwick Allen issues a compelling corrective, revealing a countertradition based in Indigenous worldviews. Alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native writers, artists, and intellectuals, Allen rebuts colonial discourses and examines the multiple ways these remarkable structures continue to hold ancient knowledge and make new meaning—in the present and for the future.

Earthworks Rising is organized to align with key functional categories for mounds (effigies, platforms, and burials) and with key concepts within mound-building cultures. From the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio to the mound metropolis Cahokia in Illinois to the generative Mother Mound in Mississippi, Allen takes readers deep into some of the most renowned earthworks. He draws on the insights of poets Allison Hedge Coke and Margaret Noodin, novelists LeAnne Howe and Phillip Carroll Morgan, and artists Monique Mojica and Alyssa Hinton, weaving in a personal history of earthwork encounters and productive conversation with fellow researchers.

Spanning literature, art, performance, and built environments, Earthworks Rising engages Indigenous mounds as forms of “land-writing” and as conduits for connections across worlds and generations. Clear and compelling, it provokes greater understanding of the remarkable accomplishments of North America’s diverse mound-building cultures over thousands of years and brings attention to new earthworks rising in the twenty-first century.

Pithouse sites represent the basic form of occupation in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico from AD 200 to the late 900s. This study presents the results of excavations of one such site, called La Gila Encantada.

Little is known about the variability present at pithouse sites away from the major Mimbres and Gila River Valleys. Nonriverine occupations have been understudied until now. This book describes subsistence and settlement practices and compares the results with recent research conducted at the larger villages in the Mimbres River Valley. Despite basic similarities in material culture, households at La Gila Encantada appear to have followed different trajectories than those along the rivers. Examining these differences, archaeologist Barbara J. Roth provides insights into some of the reasons why they existed and shows that the variability present in pithouse occupations over the years was tied to multiple factors, including environmental differences, economic practices, and the social composition of groups occupying the sites. With chapters assessing ceramic data, chipped and groundstone analysis, shell and mineral jewelry, and regional context, this look at the past offers relevant insights into current issues in Southwest archaeology, including identity, interaction, and household organization.

How an ancient Indigenous earthwork traveled from Ohio to Washington state in the mid-1970s.
 
In Transit, Chadwick Allen chronicles the surprising history of how the ancient snake effigy known as Serpent Mound, located in what is now southern Ohio, traveled to Seattle, Washington in the 1970s, at the height of American Indian activism associated with the Red Power movement. Allen considers Indigenous earthworks built for thousands of years across the eastern half of the North American continent, questioning what it would mean if they were understood not as static entities fixed in space and time, but as animate forces with the ability to travel. Allen also looks at the origins of the “modern” effigy in the nineteenth century, when archaeologists reconstructed Serpent Mound’s deteriorating form to create a static icon suitable for touristic display within the confines of a settler state memorial.
 
Drawing from archival research, interviews, and site-specific encounters, Transit meditates on the significance of building an earthen effigy in the Pacific Northwest, as part of what became the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, and on the complexity of the mound’s generative contexts. Allen’s research intersects the mid-twentieth century, when artist Robert Smithson created his iconic Spiral Jetty earth sculpture and when the Muscogee (Creek) Nation designed its innovative Mound Building. The story remains ongoing in the twenty-first century, as new mounds are rising in Oklahoma and artists, activists, and intellectuals are again asserting the power of Indigenous design.