Langford tradition and the process of tribalization on the middle Mississippian borders, The

Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Spring 1999 by Emerson, Thomas E

While tribal formation on the borders of states is a worldwide phenomenon, the role of chiefdoms in the formation process is less clear. Whitehead (1992:129130) notes the different world views of states versus chiefdoms towards those more simply organized "others" as encapsulated in the terms "savages" (i.e., "wild people") versus "barbarians" (i.e., foreigners). He argues that chiefdoms do not share the mission of states to civilize those around them but tend to incorporate "tribal" peoples only as slaves or "tribute-payers" (see also Wolf 1982:389). Such distinctions appear to me to apply more to the ultimate outcome of state or chiefdom interaction with nonhierarchical neighbors rather than to its basic nature. The demonstrated propensity of chiefdoms to systematically engage in controlled warfare and trade should have the same effect on surrounding nonhierarchical peoples as similar actions by states, although perhaps varying more in duration, intensity and/or levels of control.

Carnerio (1981) has postulated that the emergence of a chiefdom within an area has a "snowballing" effect on surrounding groups, pushing them toward a "chiefdom level" of sociopolitical organization. Similar processes might lead to the tribalization of such groups. Certainly we know from the ethnohistoric and ethnographic records that chiefdom-level societies existed adjacent to "tribal" societies (e.g., Creamer and Haas 1985; Redmond 1994; Spencer 1991; Whitehead 1992:133). My contention is simply that the outcome of asymmetrical interactions between chiefly societies and their nonhierarchical neighbors is likely to result in the systematic disruption of existing patterns of life for the latter and that the resulting changes should be discernible in the archaeological record. Such disruptions should lead to (1) coalescence of population into larger aggregations, (2) increasing centralization of leadership, perhaps reflected in centralized rituals and activities, (3) escalated levels of violence, and (4) increased territorial boundedness.

In the remainder of this article a number of contemporaneous late prehistoric assemblages in northern Illinois are examined seeking evidence of such changes. The assemblages are from terminal Late Woodland and Langford tradition sites, especially in the middle Rock River valley, and Apple and Spoon River Middle Mississippian sites. These archaeological complexes are here taken to represent specific tribal/ethnic groups, whose interaction is modeled accordingly. There are several key archaeological details we need to examine in order to understand the Late Woodland-Upper Mississippian transformation in northern Illinois. These include: (1) the nature of the terminal Late Woodland (i.e., Starved Rock Collared [Titelbaum 1998d]) occupation, with special emphasis on settlement/subsistence patterns and social organization; (2) the timing, extent, and nature of Middle Mississippian intrusions into the central Illinois and Apple River valleys with an emphasis on the intruders' political organization; (3) the timing, extent, and nature of the coalescence of the Langford tradition in northern Illinois, with an emphasis on the shifts in subsistence, settlement, and social organization that accompanied the process; and (4) the extent and nature of interactions among these various contemporaneous groups. To a large extent these archaeological assemblages are consequences of the processes of tribal and ethnic genesis within the context of interacting social groups; they owe their unique archaeological identity to those processes.