Illuminating Triangulations: Moonlight and the Mississippian World

The moon and its moonlight mediated human and non-human relationships in ways that a relational theory of bundling helps us to understand. Similar to assemblage, bundling better captures the ways that human perceptions involve triangulations and transfers. Pre-Columbian human experience in the Mississippi River valley was intimately aligned to the nightly, monthly, and generational cycles of the moon as these converged with the earth and other moving entities, things, and phenomena as sensed by people. Cahokian and other early Mississippian-era mounded complexes—Trempealeau, Angel, and Emerald in particular—mimicked specific lunar phenomena on earth and, in that way, articulated the powers of the moon among people in ways that altered the broad sweep of pre-Columbian indigenous history.