I want to tweet briefly about sports and #Cahokia and performance and power--and really I want to tweet briefly about chunkey. Chunkey is the great Mississippian sport and spread out of Cahokia, where it originated in 600 AD, to cover... a huge landscape.

We find a bunch of statues of chunkey players--the way I describe this is spear-bocce, but not the glorious sunny Mediterranean game of pernod and shaded gravel: a stadium, a packed earth field, a skilled bowler and players of Olympian strength and speed.

The first key is the stones, discoidal stone (or clay) pucks, wider on the edges than the middle, and smoothed so that they can roll long distances on the packed, smooth field. These stones are found EVERYWHERE that Mississippians touched--the sport spread beyond the rest.

Here's a short video from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey with some examples stones from different materials:

A lot of different groups use them--in the Mill Creek culture in northwestern Iowa, for example, we find them: https://archaeology.uiowa.edu/sites/archaeology.uiowa.edu/files/Mill%20Creek-5.pdf

They are up here in a number of other sites--Minnesota ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/25667654?seq=1), across the Oneota realm ( https://mvac.uwlax.edu/ProcessArch/interpret_recreation.html), with a fairly famous 19th century painting of the game being played by Mandan players ( https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/tchung-kee-mandan-game-played-ring-and-pole-4407)

Timothy Pauketat has talked about this as "America's First Pasttime," ( https://archive.archaeology.org/0909/abstracts/pastime.html) and I really love the idea--it is a core part of Mississippian soft power, of cultural and religious ceremony, and an easier spread than even shell-tempered pottery.

This pipe bowl effigy of a chunkey player is just another good example of how much chunkey permeated not just the sports world but the artistic imagination.

We also see them on gorgets and other places ( https://forums.arrowheads.com/forum/information-center-gc33/non-lithic-artifacts-gc80/wood-bone-ivory-shell-items-gc82/195929-shell-gorgets)

I love the idea of the game--the pitch, the long roll, the players staring carefully, aiming, throwing in perfect arts, the people on the sides cheering--and I love that it is still played:

Sports are not just sports. They are training, ritual, civic events, diplomacy by other means.

Chunkey is a really important part of Cahokian culture and becomes a massively important part of Mississippian culture--but it also something accessible to us, a window to the past.