Public Architecture and Power in Pre-Columbian North America

With state-level societies in mind, Bruce Trigger (1990) characterized monuments as a form of conspicuous consumption flaunting the ability of the elite to defy the principles of least-effort that are so important in structuring other aspects of social and economic organization. The prehistoric North American societies that I will be discussing, however, are not usually considered to have been ÒstatesÓ, a circumstance that allows us to dwell on processes operating at somewhat smaller scales than might be possible for, say, Egypt or Mesoamerica. This may require us to qualify TriggerÕs characterization, at least for the earliest societies under consideration. Despite the absence of states in this area, anyone familiar with North American prehistory will recognize the difficulty of surveying the 5,000 years and thousands of miles spanned by expressions of indigenous monumental architecture. For the North Americanist the title of this symposium is deliciously antiquarian in part, returning us as it does to the grand old days of Messrs. Squier and Davis (1848). Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley established or gave widespread usage to many terms (including Òsacred enclosuresÓ and Òtemple moundsÓ) still used on occasion to formally describe classes of monuments despite objections, beginning not long after (Thomas 1894), that these terms prejudged function on slim or no evidence. The addition of ÒpowerÓ to the title, however, brings us back forcefully to the complications of late twentieth century anthropological discourse, with its heterarchy of theoretical inclination, where disagreements seem so much more fundamental than the taxonomic and historical questions that detained the few Euroamerican men who began to examine the North American evidence not quite two centuries ago. Can a consensus account still be constructed, that acknowledges the insights of several interpretive possibilities? In the first part of this paper I present (very selectively) the basic data on monumental construction as viewed from the archaeological record, before, in the second part, suggesting some interpretations of this record.