Marker Posts, Sacred Space and Mortuary Ritual at the East St. Louis Site

Recent excavations at the East St. Louis Mound Center identified an adolescent female burial in the extraction ramp of a large post pit feature. This is the second example of a female burial directly associated with a post pit and the third example of human remains recovered from post pit contexts at the site. This paper addresses the sacrificial nature of these burials and discusses the involvement of post pits in mortuary ritual in the greater Cahokia area. Such burials appear to be one aspect of a sequence of events related to the delineation of sacred space and extraction of marker posts.