| Summary: | This dissertation engages and expands upon existing research on place-making and land use by examining the entanglements constituted by multiple forms of mobility during late prehistory in the Chicago region, AD 1400 until 1673. Throughout this period, the Chicago region was populated by semi-sedentary communities who moved among warm weather agricultural villages, cool weather hunting camps, an array of specialty extractive camps, and extensive foraging and hunting locations. This diverse, expansive system of land use was reshaped after European contact and systematically dismantled in the early 1800s by the US Government. Archaeologically, late prehistory in the region is categorized by a thin material record and uneven preservation, resulting in central questions about late prehistoric communities' lifeways at this time and diverging accounts of the impact of indirect European contact.
To investigate these questions, this dissertation takes a theoretical approach that foregrounds and reframes mobility. Often relegated to the background of regional archaeological analyses, mobility is broken into fluid, overlapping participatory groups whose actions have differential frequency and impact. In this work, I present a mobile system of land use as a framing device for conceptualizing and revealing broader aspects of the region and rethinking the internal dynamics of Upper Mississippian communities. Fusing Ingold's meshwork with Binfordian place-making, mobility is conceptualized as a highly politicized, often secretive, and carefully organized element foundational to land use and central to the construction of landscape and community. Methodologically, it investigates this framework using historical records and a suite of environmental, archaeological analyses that detect subtle signatures of land use. Through these investigations, this dissertation challenges and deconstructs existing narratives built upon colonial misreadings and adds to the growing body of scholarship in the Americas that demonstrates the lasting environmental impact of prehistoric and historic indigenous communities. This work demonstrates that places have deep, unbounded histories that influence contemporary landscapes, and it encourages us to reflect upon the long legacies of colonialism in the spaces we inhabit and the stories we tell.
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