Reexamining Kincaid Mounds
TAMIRA BRENNAN
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amira Brennan walked barefoot around the perimeter of a freshly dug pit, sketching lines and circles with a stick into the hard-packed Illinois clay. Her muddy shins and sweat-soaked T-shirt testified to the heat, humidity, and hard day’s work excavating a structure inhabited a thousand years ago. With her stick, Brennan—an archaeologist at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC)—traced what were probably the walls of the house. At this preliminary stage, Brennan is letting variations in the texture and color of the soil guide her hand. A few yards away, a dozen students in archaeological field methods take a break from their work to swig water and slather themselves with SPF 50 sunscreen. As Brennan worked, she conferred with Paul D. Welch, another archaeologist at SIUC. Since 2003, Welch and Brian Butler, Director of SIUC’s Center for Archaeological Investigations, have been investigating this sliver of Illinois river bottom known as the Kincaid Mounds, a Mississippian site that was occupied from roughly a.d. 1000 to 1450, found across the Ohio River from Paducah, Kentucky. Brennan, one of Welch’s doctoral students, directs the field school and supervises the day-to-day activities. “There’s a lot that we’re trying to understand about how they functioned as a society.
Kincaid was a regional political and religious center,” said Brennan. “Our goal is to learn about the layout of the community— the sizes and locations of the buildings,” said Welch. Brennan outlined splotches of orange in the otherwise dark-brown soil.The stains were burned remnants of clay daubed on the house exteriors. A small but sturdy stub of a pole at one corner could prove to be a support post.“Right now, what we’re looking for are the edges of this building,” he said. The Kincaid Mounds may be one of the best known but least explored of Mississippian sites. It’s well known because Kincaid was the laboratory in which Fay-Cooper Cole, cofounder of the Society for American Archaeology and head of the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago during perhaps its most influential period, developed many of the basic principles of field archaeology. Cole is credited with broadening archaeology’s scope from a museum-oriented study of artifacts to a discipline that encompasses social behavior and relies on rigorous scientific methods—many of those methods first put into practice during his investigation of Kincaid between 1934 and 1941. Subsequently the privately-owned land was farmed, as it always had been, for a few more decades. Cole and his
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