Theories suggest that cultures will change, sometimes dramatically, unless traditions are actively celebrated, memories are repeatedly remembered, and landscapes are infused with cultural narratives and metaphors to be experienced and re-experienced time and again (Ferguson 1992; Pauketat 2001). Without such continuous culture-making, one’s very identity as a person can change, families can become dysfunctional, and communities can break down only to reform in some other location or at some other scale. The Illinois State Archaeological Survey is investigating this process—so very important when it happens in conjunction with large-scale immigration—via three closely related archaeological sites dating to the 1830s–1860s, near Mascoutah, Illinois.
One might presume that we know everything about the “Historic period”—the past four or five centuries on this continent when events and characters were recorded for posterity. But we don’t. On the one hand, documents from the recent past can be sparse and biased, often underrepresenting farmers and other non-elite or non-masculine characters. Indeed, many kinds of people are underrepresented in historical accounts and explanations of historical processes. Thus, archaeologists study the Historic period for the same reasons that we investigate the deep past—knowledge about how and why history unfolded the way it did will help us to navigate our own future.
One might also presume that we know the causes and effects of human immigration, especially since it is an important contemporary global phenomenon. However, that’s also not the case. Even well-documented European immigration into North America is poorly understood because our old assumptions—that European ethnicities were quickly buried under an avalanche of cheap American consumer goods—are proving wrong. Indeed, our ongoing work at three German American settlements in southwestern Illinois finds evidence of resilient hybrid communities and enduring diversity in the early 19th century. At the time, German immigrants were flooding southern Illinois, and their physical legacy can still be seen and felt by walking down the original streets of places in St. Clair and Monroe Counties, including Mascoutah, Belleville, O’Fallon, Millstadt, Columbia, Waterloo, Maeystown, and more. In these towns, modest brick or stone row houses built in a German American style still line old streets (e.g., https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-village-that-time-forgot-maeystown.html).
At the three archaeological sites, we can observe a similar pattern in a rural setting that is evident in the towns as well. Two of the sites were located during a survey for the Illinois Department of Transportation. A third was identified and excavated while conducting investigations for a private development. Of the three, the best-preserved site (11S2090) is named for its original owners: the Wetzel family. It consists of the remains of a homestead that in many ways replicates the rigid layout of other German American houses and yards in St. Clair County. The post holes of a symmetrical rectangular fence surrounded a house built over a cellar. An outbuilding sat off to one side and a well was in the front yard, virtually identical to late 19th-century German American farms illustrated in a St. Clair County atlas. Over the course of an ordinary day, the Wetzel family would have moved between house, yard, cellar, outbuilding, and fields, collecting and accessing foodstuffs, tending animals, and mending tools and equipment.
We can presume, based on general social scientific theories, that such spaces helped to educate human bodies in the ways of German American traditions, regardless of whether the Wetzels or thousands of other German immigrants were aware of it. We can further presume that, once descendants of the families at these farmsteads moved into other spaces, elements of their traditions would also change, with aspects strengthened, weakened, or even erased completely.
Sometimes, underlying practices might survive, but many of the supposed traditional trappings associated with them turn out to be fleeting. Thus, German immigrants wore their own sartorial traditions when they migrated from Germany to Illinois. But various distinctive garment styles did not survive. Likewise, German immigrants also smoked tobacco using pipes. But today, smoking habits have changed dramatically, even as the generic practice of smoking tobacco continues.
Meals, recipes, tastes, using specific dish wares, and other culinary practices constitute a less-changeable mode of family and community tradition-making. Even today, tight-knit families or communities are tight-knit because they share in the production, preparation, or consumption of food, at least occasionally. Eating together becomes the basis for passing along cultural values and ways of doing things via stories and discussions around personal aspirations, relationships, religious beliefs, and the news of the day. Archaeologists who study charred or otherwise preserved bits of plant and animal foods from farmsteads have established that, among many things, culinary traditions change the least through time. In Illinois, German cooking stays German for many descendants, and it remains distinct from other Anglo-American, French-colonial, or Black-American traditions in the Midwest (Coggeshall 1986; Marshall 1979).
This continuity is no doubt because ethnic recipes, cookware, and dietary habits are easily transported by families to new locations, near or far, urban or rural. Perhaps it is also a function of community size. German immigrants that came to southwestern Illinois did so in such numbers that they could establish their own self-sustaining German American communities. These were not just enclaves or neighborhoods, but small to mid-sized towns with German language schools, churches, professionals, merchants, newspapers, and social clubs. It wasn’t until the 20th century, with the decline of farming communities in general and the impact of two World Wars fought against Germany, that some of the more public German American traditions found since the 1830s in southwestern Illinois began to diminish.
Understanding such cultural peculiarities as they are tethered to everyday life and the immigrant experience has much to tell all of us today about how the world works and what is, or is not, likely to lead to change. There are both scholarly and real-world policy implications of such knowledge, which is why advisors and scholars in the aftermath of a host of cultural and military interventions in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East over the last several decades now emphasize the importance of appreciating local cultures and modes of cultural transmission. This is also why urban scholars look to theories of cultural and ethnic “hybridity” under the conditions of immigration to analyze the innovative dynamism and economic potential of some urban, multi-ethnic environments. In both instances, the details of who, what, where, when, and how cultures are made and traditions are renewed are integral to understanding human history (Alt 2006; Bhabha 1994; Silliman 2015).
References Cited
Bavarian Hunter, from World’s Smokers Series (N33) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes. (1888). [Color lithograph]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accession Number: 63.350.202.33.4. Public Domain.
Alt, Susan M. 2006. The Power of Diversity: The Roles of Migration and Hybridity in Culture Change. In Leadership and Polity in Mississippian Society, edited by B. M. Butler, and P. D. Welch, pp. 289-308. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 33. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. Routledge, London.
Coggeshall, John M. 1986. One of Those Intangibles: The Manifestation of Ethnic Identity in Southwestern Illinois. The Journal of American Folklore, 99 (392): 177-207.
Ferguson, Leland. 1992. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Marshall, Howard Wight. 1979. Meat Preservation on the Farm in Missouri’s “Little Dixie”. The Journal of American Folklore, 92 (366): 400-417.
Pauketat, Timothy R. 2001. A New Tradition in Archaeology. In The Archaeology of Traditions: Agency and History Before and After Columbus, pp. 1-16. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Silliman, Stephen W. 2015. A Requiem for Hybridity? The Problem with Frankensteins, Purées, and Mules. Journal of Social Archaeology 15(3):277-298.