Inside the Work of the Center for American Archeology
This summer, I attended the Center for American Archeology’s (CAA) field school in
Kampsville, Illinois. I spoke with Dr. Jason King, director of CAA, about what excavation
can reveal, how archaeologists decide where to dig, and how their work helps tell a
broader human story.
VA: Could you share more about the Center for American Archeology and its
mission?
Dr. Jason King: The Center for American Archeology was founded in 1953 by Stuart
Strieber, and we’ve been working in the Lower Illinois Valley since 1958. The
CAA became more established and active in the Lower Illinois Valley when Strieber
completed his master’s thesis at the Kampsville Mound Group, which is also
where Kampsville got its name.
The organization started as Archaeological Research, Inc., and in the 1970s became
the Foundation for Illinois Archeology. By the early 1980s, we had become the Center
for American Archeology.
Today, our mission centers on education, research, public service, archaeological
stewardship, and outreach. A big part of that work is helping people understand why
archaeology matters and how it can tell us about parts of the past that were never
formally recorded.
VA: What kinds of artifacts have you discovered in the Lower Illinois Valley?
Dr. Jason King: Everything. As you know, there are more than 10,000 years of human
history in the Lower Illinois Valley and the surrounding region, so archaeologically, it is
incredibly rich. We’ve found artifacts documenting that entire span of history, from the
earliest occupants at the end of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene all the
way through historic times.
Our projects cover that full range. We’re probably best known for Koster, which is
primarily associated with Archaic and Middle Woodland archaeology. But we’ve also
done Late Woodland and Mississippian work, and we have historic projects underway
as well.
So, we really span the entire 10,000 years. We’ve found everything from stone tools
and other early artifacts to pottery and historic materials — essentially, the kinds of
things people have left behind over time.
VA: That's really cool.
Dr. Jason King: It’s a really interesting place to work because many of the sites are
multi-component, meaning you can find evidence from several different time periods in
the same place.
VA: Absolutely! What is the most interesting thing you've found using technology
such as ground-penetrating radar?
Dr. Jason King: That’s a good question. Remote sensing methods like ground-
penetrating radar, magnetometry, and electrical resistance can tell us a lot. We didn’t
use them at German this summer, but they can help us focus excavations and identify
where we might be more productive at a potential site. Otherwise, in many ways, you’re
going in blind and don’t know what you’re going to find.
For us, a lot of the value of remote sensing has been learning about a site without
having to excavate it. At the Golden Eagle site, for example, we were able to document
a human-built embankment around the site. It’s the only one we have in the Lower
Illinois Valley, and we were able to identify it largely through electrical resistance
tomography and ground-penetrating radar.
Magnetometry also helped us at the Kampsville Mound Group. We were able to
document that significant portions of the mounds were still intact, even though they had
previously been thought to have been destroyed by farming. That was exciting, and it
also helped convince the landowner to protect the site rather than keep it in agricultural
production.
So for me, finding features like the embankment or discovering things that we thought
had been lost to history is always exciting.
VA: Thank you for sharing. How do you decide when it's actually necessary to
excavate a site?
Dr. Jason King: Excavation is really a tool for understanding the past through the
material things people left behind. We don’t go into a site just to dig. We want to
address a specific question, and we excavate in places where the fieldwork can help us
learn something we don’t already know.
For example, archaeologists still don’t fully understand the interactions among people
living in the Lower Illinois Valley at the end of what we call the Late Woodland period,
particularly during the Jersey Bluff phase, which was at least partially contemporaneous
with Cahokia. Questions like that, where we need more data to better understand what
was happening, are what motivate excavation.
I think that can sometimes be difficult to communicate to the public. We’re not just
digging to find cool things. The things we find are often very interesting, but what really
matters is what those objects can tell us about people in the past. That’s our guiding
principle. We excavate when the fieldwork can help answer a question about the past
that we don’t yet understand.
VA: That makes sense. You can't just dig for the fun of it.
Dr. Jason King: Yes, always with some kind of research question. But one of the
benefits of doing archaeology in the same region over such a long period of time is that
the work builds on itself. We’ve been around for almost 75 years and have been
working in the Illinois Valley throughout that time.
Different questions and different needs have motivated the archaeology over the years.
At one point, for example, the Center maintained a contract archaeology firm, so some
of that work was driven by compliance laws.
But all of those projects contribute to a growing body of information about the region.
They help us understand how sites varied during the same time periods and allow us to
build a broader, more complete picture of the past.
VA: Large mounds have been discovered in the Illinois River Valley. Why did
Native American communities build such large mounds?
Dr. Jason King: Yes. That’s actually a complex question because there is a very old
mound-building tradition in the Lower Illinois Valley. Glossing over a lot of detail, by the
Middle Archaic period, several thousand years BC, people were already beginning to
bury their dead, primarily adults in the prime of life, in raised areas such as knolls or
ridges along the bluffs.
By the Middle Woodland period, beginning around 50 BC in the Lower Illinois Valley, we
see formal mounds being built. Many of these were community cemeteries. Residential
areas were generally down at the base of the bluffs, in hollows like Kampsville or
Crawford Creek, while people buried their dead on top of the bluffs. These were
community cemeteries in the sense that people of all ages were buried there, including
children, adolescents, adults, and older adults.
At the same time, during the Middle Woodland period, people were also building very
large mounds in the floodplain or on ridges within the floodplain. Not all of those
mounds necessarily contained many burials. Some might have had only one or a few
individuals buried near the center.
Through the Center’s work, we’ve come to think of these floodplain mound sites as
places that involved much more than mortuary activity. Burial may actually have been a
relatively small part of what happened there. Multiple residential communities, both small
communities and hamlets, may have come together at these sites for ritual activities,
dances, feasting, and other gatherings. So, these large Middle Woodland mound sites
seem to have anchored spaces where different communities, and perhaps broader kin
groups, came together for seasonal activities.
In that sense, the mounds could serve different purposes. During the Late Woodland
period, people continued to build mounds, although they were structured somewhat
differently. We still see fairly complex mortuary activity, with the mounds largely located
on the bluffs. We don’t see much mound building in the floodplain that we know of,
although there was probably still activity at those sites because we find Late Woodland
materials there.
By Mississippian times, there was a trend toward less built-up cemeteries and more flat
cemeteries, so there was a shift away from mounds being used primarily for burial.
Mound interments still occurred, but mounds also took on other functions. Cahokia is
probably the best-known example, with very large, flat-topped mounds supporting public
structures, workshops, residences, and other buildings, along with some mortuary
activity.
So over time, we see a growing diversity in how mounds were used, from primarily
mortuary or ceremonial spaces to places that could serve a much wider range of
purposes.
VA: So, essentially, the purpose of the mounds transformed from being mortuary
or ceremonial spaces to community-based gathering places?
Dr. Jason King: Yes. In the Lower Illinois Valley, as far as we know, mounds were
primarily located on the bluffs and used as mortuary spaces or cemeteries, where
funeral rituals took place. Cahokia, of course, is in the American Bottom along the
Mississippi and represents a somewhat different Mississippian context.
In the floodplain, though, there seems to have been a much more complex set of social
and ceremonial activities taking place. That may have helped provide a model for how
mounds were used later in Mississippian times, when they became less exclusively
ceremonial and took on more civic and community functions.
VA: How were they able to build such large mounds back in the day without the
assistance of any machinery or technology?
Dr. Jason King: It was a group effort. Mounds were collective projects. There’s a
tendency to imagine that a mound was built all at once—that a group of people decided
to build something two or three meters high and 50 meters across. But that’s generally
In Middle Woodland times, and probably Late Woodland as well, there was often a
central structure built first, with burials placed around it. That area might then be
capped, extended, and modified over time. At Mound House, which is our best-
documented floodplain mound group, there was an initial mound and some kind of bent-
pole structure nearby. Those may not have been exactly contemporaneous. They were
later mounded over, and other structures may have been built as well, including what
appears to have been a stage.
So mound building was a process. These weren’t simply massive structures built in one
episode. They developed through extensions, additions, and different stages.
One thing we try to emphasize is that mounds shouldn’t be thought of as just big piles of
dirt where people were buried. They were complex structures with their own
architecture, and they may have been built over long periods of time. We often don’t
know exactly how long because there isn’t always datable material, such as carbon,
associated with each building episode.
We also think the process of building the mound may itself have been a ritual or
ceremony. It’s easy to assume the mound was simply built first and that the important
activity came afterward, such as a burial. But those of us working in the Illinois Valley
have argued that the construction process itself was meaningful. Multiple communities
and groups of people may have participated as the mound was built and modified over
time.
What we see today is simply the mound in its final form, after the building stopped. To
really understand it, we have to think about the different stages of construction and the
different ways the mound may have been used over time.
That said, there isn’t necessarily one uniform pattern. In other parts of the midcontinent,
there are examples where mounds may have been built much more quickly, and there
may be cases here that we simply haven’t recognized. There are regular patterns in
mound building, but there is also a lot of variation.
VA: That's super fascinating that the actual process of building the mound could
have been a ritual in itself.
Dr. Jason King: We think so. We’ve argued in a couple of publications that mound
building may have been tied to world-renewal rituals. In some cases, people appear to
have brought blocks of sod from different locations to the site to construct the mound.
The act of building the mound itself may have been part of that ceremonial renewal.
Once a mound was established, that construction and renewal process may actually
have been more important than the mortuary activity. Burial may have been a relatively
small part of it, perhaps even a founding event. The more significant activity may have
been building and maintaining the mound as a setting for community and multi-
community rituals. That’s our interpretation, though. We can’t know for certain
how the people who built them understood those activities.
VA: That's really interesting. What do these ancient sites tell us about how people
gathered, traded, or lived together hundreds of years ago?
Dr. Jason King: It depends. There are a lot of things archaeology can address,
although some questions require more creative thinking and different approaches.
Diet is a good example. Archaeology can tell us not only what people ate, but also how
they processed food. That work helped archaeologists understand plant domestication
in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States and how people moved from gathering
wild plants to cultivating truly domesticated plants, well before maize and beans arrived.
So farming forms were already developing in the Midwest before maize and beans
became part of the picture.
Diet also connects to other aspects of life, including ceramic technology and the
reproduction of communities. There has been research suggesting shifts in the number
of children being born and potentially shorter intervals between pregnancies. Those
changes may correlate with developments in pottery technology that made it possible to
prepare foods such as weaning gruels. That, in turn, may have contributed to changes
in fertility rates.
So, there are all kinds of things we can learn, and they are often interconnected. But
some of the more complex questions are much harder to answer. For example, how did
these multi-community mound sites and these ritual and ceremonial places fit into the
political and social dynamics of the valley? We’ve argued that as people migrated into
the valley during Middle Woodland times, these places and rituals may have helped
communities negotiate how they would live together and interact.
That is much more abstract than simply inventorying what you find at a site—the types
of seeds, projectile points, pottery, stone, or other materials. And one of the challenges
with these more complex questions is that several explanations may be equally
plausible. The evidence doesn’t always allow us to eliminate every possible
interpretation.
Ultimately, archaeology can tell us about almost everything. Part of the limitation is our
own creativity and what questions we are willing to ask. If archaeology is simply an
inventory of materials, then that is all it will tell us: what tools people used, what
materials they were made from, what they ate, or where they buried their dead.
It takes more theoretical work and more complex arguments to move from that tangible
evidence to questions about politics, society, ideology, or cosmology. But it can be done.
Archaeology gives us a window into all of those things, as long as we’re willing to do the
work to connect the physical evidence to those broader questions.
VA: To play it back, archaeology can give us a window into our past if we are
willing to make connections and do the detective work to string pieces together.
Dr. Jason King: Yeah, and you have to be willing to play with ideas and draw
theoretical insights from history, anthropology, and other disciplines to build
explanations. You also have to be willing to be wrong.
Sometimes an idea that seemed promising doesn’t work out the way you expected, but
that can still lead to an important result. You may learn something new or be pushed in
a direction you hadn’t anticipated.
I think people sometimes assume that you dig something up, look at it in its context, and
it somehow gives you all the answers on its own. It doesn’t. Archaeology requires an
active interaction with the evidence. You have to interpret the data, test ideas against it,
and be willing to change your thinking based on what you find.
VA: What practices do you follow to preserve the site your team is working on?
Dr. Jason King: It depends on the site. We generally only want to excavate where it
can tell us something new or allow us to test a specific question. We usually don’t want
to excavate an entire site to the point where nothing is left.
There are cases where we may want to excavate an entire feature, such as a house
basin. At the German site, for example, there are so few documented Late Woodland,
particularly Jersey Bluff phase, houses that we want to excavate those features
carefully and document them properly.
So how much we excavate depends on the site and the questions we’re trying to
answer. At the same time, we want to leave portions of sites intact for future
archaeologists who may have better methods or technologies.
Remote sensing helps with that. At the German site, for example, the magnetometry
data allowed us to target particular areas and sample across the site rather than
excavating everything. But remote sensing isn’t always possible. As you saw this
summer, trees and heavy brush can prevent us from collecting that kind of data. In
those cases, we may have to use systematic test units across the site to gather
information.
Whenever possible, we try to preserve sites rather than fully excavate them. The
exception might be compliance archaeology, where a site is going to be destroyed by
construction. In that situation, you would excavate everything that is going to be
disturbed.
And, of course, all of the materials and records from those excavations go into
collections for analysis and future research by qualified archaeologists. So even when a
large portion of a site has to be excavated, the records and materials are preserved for
the future.
VA: Got it! So, the rule is to dig only as much as you need to, not in excess?
Dr. Jason King: Yes. At the German site, for example, we’ll be wrapping up the work
soon. I’m hoping this is our last season, although we may need a little more time.
At some point, the data starts to become redundant for the questions you’re trying to
answer. We’re collecting enough information to address those questions, but we’re also
trying to understand the extent of the site and how well different parts of it are
preserved. All of that factors into decisions about how much more excavation is
necessary.
Our goal isn’t to strip the entire landform and collect everything. It’s to gather the
information we need while preserving as much of the site as possible.
VA: My last question! What got you interested in archaeology?
Dr. Jason King: I didn’t go into college intending to major in anthropology or
archaeology. I took an anthropology class because I had always found it interesting.
When I was very young, I wanted to be an archaeologist, but that was more of a first-
grade idea than a serious plan.
At some point in college, I took an archaeology class and really enjoyed it. I had always
been interested in people broadly. For example, how societies and cultures work and
how the different parts fit together. But it wasn’t until my last year of college that I
decided to switch to anthropology. Even then, I was still thinking I might do something
like forensic anthropology.
Then, over spring break, I volunteered to help excavate a site. I was taking an
archaeology class, and the professor said they needed volunteers. I spent a week in the
field. It was colder than I expected, so I was definitely underdressed, but I loved it. I left
that week thinking, this is what I want to do.
After that, I attended a field school and became involved with the work at the Center,
and I’ve been involved in Illinois archaeology ever since. That was in 1999.
What has kept me interested is the opportunity to understand what we can about the past.
Even in periods where we have written history, there is still a lot that was never
written down and a lot that we don’t know.
I see the broader mission of anthropology and archaeology as telling the story of people
across different places and times. Archaeology is one part of that. For me, it’s about
adding to the larger human story.
VA: Yeah, I was also first introduced to anthropology through forensic
anthropology. I was watching Bones, I don't know if you've heard of it, the TV
show?
Dr. Jason King: Yes, of course! I took classes and was really leaning in that direction,
and one of the professors who advised me was a forensic anthropologist. I was very
interested in it.
But it’s also difficult work. You’re often dealing with some of the worst things people do
to one another, whether that’s crime scenes, human rights violations, mass graves, or
other situations. It’s very important work, and I know people who do it, but I also think it
can be incredibly draining and challenging because of what you’re exposed to.
For me, being part of telling the larger human story, wherever that work takes place, is
what matters. And archaeology is also a lot of fun.
VA: Dr. King, couldn’t agree more. So wonderful chatting with you, and I am so
glad I got the opportunity to join the field school at Kampsville this summer!
Thank you for your time.
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