The Frontier in Pre-Columbian Illinois

Notably, ceremonial features associated with Cahokia politics and ritual practices such as platform mounds and plazas remained absent from the region. [...]materials, ideas, and practices moved selectively across the frontier between Cahokia and the Ozark Plateau, allowing Cahokia to influence its neighbors without politically or economically dominating them.19 Though most exotic materials and objects of foreign origin found in the Mississippian American Bottom are from proximate regions, Cahokia was part of an extensive interaction network. The history of Cahokia and its frontiers demonstrate that Native North America's pre-Columbian past is significant not only because it establishes a deeper temporal context for American Indian history, but also because it suggests that American Indians were well practiced at creating and sustaining cross-cultural relationships when Europeans arrived. [...]Indian historical experiences before the Columbian encounter had a profound influence on the colonial world that they would create together with Europeans and Africans.27 Cahokia's historical achievement extends beyond the construction of enduring monuments of a momentary attainment of "complexity." There is ample evidence that western Fort Ancient hunters hunted bison in northern Kentucky along the saline springs of Big Bone Creek. [...]Fort Ancient hunters, already aware of the economic opportunities presented by bison, may have traveled west to visit Oneota friends and kinsmen where bison were found with greater frequency and in greater numbers. The second-hand accounts of Jesuit Father Claude Allouez and Bacqueville de la Potherie, both written in the second half of the seventeenth century suggest the war occurred sometime between the 1620s and the 1640s.46 Notably, such a date roughly corresponds with the disappearance of Oneota Huber phase ceramics from the archaeological record of northern Illinois. [...]the disappearance of Oneota material culture coincides with accounts of the Winnebagos' abandonment of their homeland and the appearance of Illinois in the region around the southern shores of Lake Michigan.