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Exchange of preciosities is often considered an integral factor in the emergence of Mississippian chiefdoms, and the rise of Cahokia has been linked to such long-distance trade. We know that Cahokia was the center of production for large flint clay figurines and effigy pipes (Emerson and Hughes 2000). Similar Cahokia-style figures have been found in the Trans-Mississippi South and the Southeast. We investigated the material used.to make these figures using a newly developed nondestructive PIMA SP™ spectroscopic technology to identify the stone and to determine their source location. These analyses proved that the figures were made of Missouri flint clay from quarries near St. Louis. We submit that Cahokia was the twelfth-century source for the production of these Cahokia-style figures. Outside of Cahokia the flint clay figures were primarily found in Caddoan mortuaries, reinforcing earlier evidence of a strong Cahokia-Caddoan connection. The available chronological and contextual information indicates the flint clay figures left Cahokia after it began to decline in the late thirteenth-century, through various mechanisms of extra-local exchange rather than as part of any systematic prestige-goods network. The association of these highly symbolic figures with Cahokia allows us to reevaluate the indigenous iconography and propose that many of the themes (e.g., fertility and warfare) that later appear in Eastern Woodlands native cosmology such as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex were first codified here in the twelfth-century.

Mary W. Helms’s observation that spatial distance often correlates with spiritual power has become an axiom in interpreting the role of exotic materials in societies. This is especially evident in explanations of the North American Hopewell Interaction Sphere. The circulation and accumulation of exotic materials in massive mortuary caches peaked during the Hopewell era (100 B.C. to A.D. 300). The premise that Hopewell smoking pipes were made in Ohio, primarily of local raw material, and circulated to foreign locations was an integral part of this interaction model. In this study we demonstrate, primarily using reflectance near-infrared spectroscopy (NIS), that early Hopewell Tremper Mound pipe raw-material acquisition focused on exotic pipestones from Illinois and Minnesota. By contrast, later Mound City cache pipes were almost exclusively made from local limestone and pipestone. The discovery of this shift in preference for and/or access to different quarry sources by Ohio Hopewell societies provides new perspectives on early Hopewell development and long-distance interaction.

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