We present the recent results of a magnetometry survey of the Spring Lake Tract conducted during the summer of 2015 at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site located along the Mississippi River Floodplain in southern Illinois. This tract, located southeast of Woodhenge and west of the Grand Plaza, is situated north of two known borrow pits and includes an additional, previously unidentified borrow pit. Through comparing our gradiometer results with our subsequent test excavations, we argue that this area of Cahokia potentially demonstrates an increase in building density at the Spring Lake Tract during the transition between the Terminal Late Woodland and Lohmann phases. In addition, our survey and exaction results demonstrate that this area was densely occupied between the Lohmann and Stirling phases. During the Moorehead phase, we identify a possible increase in habitation based on hypothesized structure density using statistical analyses of length and width ratios (m) and structure area (m2). Our preliminary results suggest that the Spring Lake Tract saw an increase in habitation during the Moorehead phase, a new perspective on the density and use of domestic space during Cahokia's late occupational history.

In this paper we propose a new vision of educational development that reimagines how graduate instructors are socialized and professionalized in academic settings. We describe a Transgressive Learning Community (TLC) that empowers graduate instructors with tools to reveal, mitigate, and disrupt oppressive structures in higher education. Our learning community is founded on critical race and feminist conceptualizations of pedagogical inquiry in its design, implementation, and assessment to serve underprivileged, underserved, and historically underrepresented graduate students. We argue that the intersections of marginalized and graduate student identities create distinct experiences of discrimination, marginalization, tokenism, isolation, and impostor syndrome due to a lack of sustained teaching mentorship within the academy. The Transgressive Learning Community model that we propose in this paper functions to create spaces of transgressive and transformational pedagogical engagement for graduate students who exist at the intersections of these identities.

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The rise of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian Native American city north of Mexico, and the rapid spread of Mississippian culture across the midcontinental and southeastern USA after AD 1000 has long been a focus of archaeological inquiry. Trade, political control, and emulation constitute some of the theories used to examine the wide distribution of Cahokian artifacts and architecture. Early cultural historical interpretations focused on migration and diffusion as the mechanism by which Cahokian objects and practices spread, a position heavily critiqued by processualists. Mounting archaeological evidence, now supported by technological advancements in materials-sourcing and isotope analyses (see Emerson and Hedman 2016; Slater et al. 2014), has brought back theories of migration, with attendant processes of hybridity and creolization (see Alt 2006, 2018; Millhouse 2012), to characterize Mississippian interactions and movements. These movements highlight the diverse cultural interactions that worked to, in part, create this Native American city-one that informed the spread of Mississippianism beyond the American Bottom. For this special issue, we invited our colleagues to consider the possibility and role of a Cahokian diaspora to understand cultural influence, complexity, historicity, and movements in the Mississippian Southeast. Collectively, we trace how the movements of Cahokian and American Bottom materials, substances, persons, and non-human bodies converged in the creation of Cahokian identities both within and outside of the Cahokia homeland. Drawing initial inspiration from theories of diaspora, our goal in organizing this collection of papers was to explore the dynamic movements of human populations by critically engaging with the ways people materially construct or deconstruct their social identities in relation to others within the context of physical movement.