ABSTRACT
The domestication and use of tobacco in North America dates to the Early Woodland period, and the cosmological dimension associated with the practice is evident during the Middle Woodland or Hopewell periods in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Cahokia was the largest pre-Columbian settlement in North America and, likely, the center of a "revitalized religion" or politico-religious movement. Besides its sheer scale and population, this pre-Columbian phenomenon featured new iconography, pottery types, household construction. People, animals, organisms, materials, and phenomena of all kinds move around within larger fields of activity, coming into contact and becoming associated with each other. Movement itself is the key phenomenon to be studied, since it defines whatever it is that we then call agents, human beings, cultures, and societies. Non-anthropocentric, animist, phenomenological, neuro phenomenological, and practice-based approaches in archaeology begin to address the question of how by giving explanatory priority to movements and relational fields.
