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Timothy R. Pauketat is an American archaeologist, director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, the Illinois State Archaeologist, and professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is known for his historical theories and his investigations at Cahokia, the major center of precolonial Mississippian culture in the American Bottom region of Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri.
Pauketat earned an M.A. in Anthropology from SIU-Carbondale in 1986 and then left for the University of Michigan to pursue his doctorate. At Michigan, Pauketat worked with Professors Henry Wright, Richard Ford, John O'Shea, and Jeff Parsons, and teamed up with then-students Preston Miracle, Andrew Darling, Alex Barker, David Anderson, and John Robb. A particularly memorable field encounter that he, Preston Miracle, and David Anderson had with the "dark forces" of American capitalism in 1987 is recorded in his 2007 book Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions. He earned his PhD in Anthropology in 1991.
The years between the mid 1990s and the mid 2010s were filled with field work, field schools, and laboratory study. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation, Pauketat led excavations at a series of endangered archaeological sites on the margins of Greater Cahokia, including the Halliday, Pfeffer, Grossmann, and Emerald Acropolis sites. Up until 2019, he regularly taught classes such as “Introductory World Archaeology” and “Archaeological Theory". He also led the annual University of Illinois archaeological field school for 17 out of the 20 years that his primary appointment was with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Field School in Archaeology, Anthropology, U of I In 2019, he assumed the role of the Director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS), a subdivision of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois. As Director, he oversees the research and compliance archaeology of upwards of 100 staff and is engaged in transforming the research and engagement activities of ISAS, the largest archaeological organization of its kind in the U.S.
Pauketat is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the archaeology journal Antiquity.
Pauketat has used research from contemporaneous archaeological sites to formulate a comprehensive, large-scale picture of the Mississippian world. He is interested in investigating such questions as the emergence of civilization, especially as we might imagine that today to have involved human and other-than-human forces. He has investigated culture areas beyond the Mississippian heartland to define what he once called his "historical processual" approach. Today, that approach has been extended to draw on New Materialist theories and a variety of ontological or relational approaches to history and humanity.
Whatever the theoretical underpinnings, Pauketat has always relied on hard data and artifacts to discover new or previously ignored information. Doing so led him to an early reconstruction of Cahokian urban history as beginning around A.D. 1050, when pre-Cahokian settlements were suddenly transformed into the large, planned community of Cahokia proper, marked by a sudden preponderance of houses and the rapid adoption of wall-trench housing that replaced the previously common post-wall housing. Also during this time, a distinctive pattern of farmsteads developed in the uplands east of Cahokia proper, dubbed the "Richland complex" by Pauketat. The walls of houses in Richland farming settlements were set into trenches, but some post-wall and hybrid-wall forms were discovered. Initially considered an example of cultural resistance, the hybrid and traditional forms were later realized to be the homes of immigrants to the Greater Cahokia region. The documented Richland complex farmsteads are estimated to have housed thousands of persons, representing a huge population shift. This shift did not originate from local inhabitants, however, as pottery styles attest.
Pauketat and his colleagues noticed a great amount of artifact diversity among Richland sites, including some non-local pottery styles (“Varney Red Filmed”), and pottery-making methods of the local style (shell-tempered) that differed from the norm (thicker walls, etc.) These villages have fewer finely crafted items or ritual objects and a high percentage of workshop debris, likely indicating their purpose as support communities for the Cahokian elite. His notion of a transplanted farmer population is supported by the complete abandonment of these upland villages at the same time of Cahokia’s presumed collapse around two centuries later.
Pauketat questions established knowledge about ancient North America. For instance, due to improvements in radiometric dating and new methodologies, such as identification of domestic remains, he and other researchers have concluded that Cahokia rose and fell over a much shorter time period, around three hundred years, than had been previously attributed. The ubiquity of Cahokian-derived goods across much of then contemporaneous Midwest and Mid-South U.S. has also been examined. While this distribution was most certainly due to an exchange network, Pauketat posits relations between Cahokians and other Mississippians as not being purely environmentally determined, following previous interpretations (by who?). Rather, he suggests that political relationships inspired much of the trading, as their natural environment satisfied their needs for survival. By trading, Cahokia may have been trying to bring outsiders within their sphere of influence, evidenced in the sudden large amount of Cahokian material culture found outside of Cahokia. At a more local scale, the sudden appearance and proliferation of Cahokian artifacts is coupled with housing reorganization of peoples and the incorporation of greater Cahokia.Pauketat, Timothy R. (1998) “Refiguring the Archaeology of Greater Cahokia”, Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 6 No. 1
With regard to Cahokia, Pauketat used practice theory to interpret the proliferation of the chunkey stone. Pre-Cahokian American Bottom dwellers were using an early form of this round disc with two concave sides as early as 600 AD. This artifact is not found outside this region until the height of Cahokia about 400 years later. The sudden popularity and proliferation of the game pieces across the Mid-South and Southeast U.S. at this time suggests mass organization of the game played with this shaped stone. The massive plazas at Cahokia would have been an ideal setting, and large enough to accommodate all parts of Cahokian society. The organizers of the games, likely the Cahokian elite, could bring together all levels of society by using a longstanding tradition. This game tradition retained its prestige, continuing to be practiced until the 19th century among certain Native American tribes. It was ethnographically documented as a competition for the losing side’s worldly possessions.
Between 2012 and 2018, Pauketat worked with Susan Alt (Indiana University, Bloomington) on an even larger-scale investigation of upland "shrine complexes" due east of Cahokia. Over five intensive field seasons, Alt and Pauketat's teams undercovered evidence of periodic, large-scale religious events at a place dubbed the "Emerald Acropolis." Here, Pauketat verified his claims that Cahokian religion was centered on the long 18.6-year cycle of the Moon, drawing inspiration from colleagues at Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, and the Hopewell sites of central Ohio. Since then, Alt and Pauketat have sought to understand the relationship between religion to politics generally, at sites in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Indiana, and Illinois. Like most pre-modern religions, those of precolonial America were practiced through rituals and events. Pauketat is seeking to understand the larger historical implications of such performed religion. He discusses this and other theories about Cahokia's connections and influence in his Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (2009). In an early review of this work, Pauketat's old mentor, William I. Woods, took issue with Pauketat's suggestion (on page 2) that Cahokia may have been in contact with Mesoamerican civilizations, and to his belief that they have important similarities in mythic images and religious beliefs. Woods notes that James B. Griffin, "the dean of Eastern North American archaeology," repeatedly stated that there was "absolutely no evidence for direct contact between Mesoamerica and Cahokia." William I. Woods, " Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat (review)", Southeastern Geographer, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 235-237, . C. Wesson says that Pauketat presents this theory but is not committed to proving a connection between Cahokia and ancient Mexico; rather it is one of several alternatives that he explores to provide an overview of the field. C. Wesson, "Review: T. Pauketat's 'Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi' ", Journal of American History, June 1, 2011, .
Pauketat's An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America was published in 2013. The previous year he also edited the volume, The Oxford Handbook of North American Archaeology (2012). Since then, several other volumes of his have been published. Most recently, Pauketat has written an extended treatment of the big history of North America that includes the effects of both Medieval climate change and Mesoamerica on the rest of North America. His latest book is Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial North America (2023).
Pauketat, Timothy R. and Alt, Susan M.
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