 Though often much more limited in scope and time than academic archaeology, Pauketat's book, "The Ascent of Chiefs...", details the artifacts in part “salvaged” from the construction of a highway that bisects Cahokia.Dividing up the artifacts by radiometrically dated and ceramic-seriated phases, he notes an increasing number of foreign goods as time progresses in the Emergent Mississippian phases.He has interpreted this growth as an enlargement of high-ranking peoples able to secure such networks necessary to move such goods as Gulf Coast shell from distant locations 

In an interview with Peter Shea in 2013, Pauketat characterizes his work as being about objects and their connections to families.