Coalescence and animal use : examining community building at the multi-ethnic Morton Village site

Across human history, groups of people have come together, found commonalities, and negotiated their differences in order to form new communities; a process known as coalescence. Until recently, archaeologists have primarily studied this social phenomenon by looking at the large-scale changes that occur, including settlement aggregation and demography. New research has begun to focus on smaller scales of analysis, including aspects of daily life and the role of common behaviors in bringing people together. One such aspect of daily life is food. While previous research has recognized that changes in subsistence systems, such as a need to intensify the production of food to feed larger numbers of people, are commonly part of the coalescence process, little has been done to understand how these changes would affect a community or how a socially charged medium, such as food, may have contributed to ongoing coalescence. In this dissertation, I examine how animal use intersects with the broader process of coalescence through a multidimensional analysis of faunal remains from Morton Village, a site of on-going coalescence in the central Illinois River valley. Specifically, three aspects of animal use during the coalescence process were examined: 1) studying the overall diet as it intersects with the negotiation of everyday life, 2) animal access strategies including foodsharing practices, and 3) the use of animals and animal symbolism in ritual activities as a part of the long-term process of coalescence. These analyses found that the occupants of Morton Village used a diverse range of animal species, avian symbolism, and foodsharing/distribution practices within a variety of social interactions and practices. From this data, I argue that the use of animals played an important role in the coalescence process at Morton Village by assisting in building social relationships that were critical to community formation and maintenance during the coalescence process. This study demonstrates that the study of animal use is a fruitful avenue of research that can reveal several mechanisms for how social relationships are formed and community building processes occurred during coalescence.