May 11, 2024 Prof. Timothy R. Pauketat, Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana: “From the Maya to the Mississippi: A Surprising New History of Medieval America.”
How did climate change impact Indigenous North America a thousand years ago? Archaeological evidence now supports a pan-continental scenario where people during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (800-1300 CE) communed with water and storm gods in circular shrines with the aid of mollusk shells and other materials. A series of physical and religious movements can be traced from Mesoamerica into the Mississippi valley among divergent cultures of agriculturalists who experienced Medieval climate change in different ways but via the same gods. This talk outlined those movements across the continent while focusing mostly on the wealth of detailed archaeological evidence from the Native city of Cahokia near modern-day St. Louis.
Tim Pauketat is the Illinois State Archaeologist, Director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, and Professor of Medieval Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois. He is the author of numerous scholarly papers and the author or editor of 17 books, including The Archaeology of Ancient North America (2020, Cambridge) and Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America (2023, Oxford). His research projects have focused on the Cahokian phenomenon and Mississippian cultures up and down the Mississippi Valley, and his research interests revolve around understanding the causal relationships between matter, history, and humanity.
A video recording is available for members at Meeting Archives.