Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History)

My family visited Cahokia Mounds two weeks ago, and I read this book in the week before we went, and am I glad I did! Absolutely fascinating from beginning to end, I stayed up until two or three in the morning two nights because having thought I'd just finish the chapter, when I finished and glanced at the first paragraph of the next chapter, it was so interesting that I just couldn't stop. It reminded me of Jared Diamond's books, which have a similar effect on me: every single page is jam-packed with new and interesting information.The site itself was disappointing, because no one employed there or in charge of preparing the exhibits in the museum is even aware of the wealth of information which is documented in this book. I mentioned to one woman who had worked there for many years about the many sacrificial victims in Mound 72 (also numerous ones in other locations there), and she denied it, saying that there were only 19 sacrificial victims in one location just south of Monks Mound. ???!!!This site is so important that it should get a lot more attention than it has, but unfortunately the site does not give even a glimmer of the civilization which was once there. The museum is very modest and only has a few relics (but four tiny interesting figurines of women with babies and a flute player with a white mask for which I can find no image nor explanation on the Internet), a number of huts with long yellow thatch showing where they lived, and a movie giving the basic facts. Then you can walk around and see the many mounds, climb up Monks Mound for a great view of St. Louis (if you can run across the busy highway without being hit by a car: why is there not a pedestrian bridge for visitors?) See a reconstruction of a number of wooden poles in a large circle near Monks Mound, Woodhenge (get it?), used for astronomical observations and celebrations.This is some of what I learned in this ground-breaking book. Cahokia was just a relatively small town until 1054, when a supernova was seen all over the Americas, as depicted on cave walls and pottery in many places. And the Cahokians interpreted that as a sign that they should completely raze their old city and build a new one on the same site. And they did, building a LARGE city with the walls of houses prefabricated off-site and employing everyone in bringing dirt one basket-load at a time to build huge mounds in a very short time. 20,000 people at its peak, the largest city in North America until Philadelphia passed it, but not until 1800. It developed a religion with new aspects which were so appealing that Cahokia sent emissaries out to successfully convert hundreds of other groups of Indians all across the South and Midwest. The Indians in Wisconsin who had built the effigy mounds converted and completely stopped building effigy mounds, instead putting Cahokia-style figures and designs in their art work. The new Cahokia ball game chunkey became mega-popular, and was enthusiastically adopted by hundreds of groups of Indians all across America, each giving it a name linguistically similar to chunkey. The Cahokians engaged in mortuary theater, sacrificing large numbers of victims, usually young women, in performances which there's reason to believe were part of the introduction of new leaders as resuscitations of the old, deceased leaders. At locations where thousands of onlookers could watch the proceedings.Mound 72 is the most dramatic location of these rituals, with two leaders buried one on top of the other (the author describes how important the legends of the Hero Twins or Brothers were, one a Thunderbird and the other a trickster, Bead-Spitting alter-ego, and there are depictions on cave walls of a bead-spitting figure: in my Internet search I found a cave image of a figure spitting out a bead, but would have had NO idea of his significance were it not for Pauketat's discussion of him as the evil twin of the Thunderbird hero/god), the upper one on the remains of a thunderbird robe made out of 20,000 shell beads from shells brought from the Gulf of Mexico. With 52 girls between 15 and 25 sacrificed nearby, with a 30 year old female chaperone buried on top of them. And four men nearby, bound at the elbows, their heads and hands cut off. And that wasn't all. There were MANY similar sacrifices made both at Mound 72 and many others. Pauketat believes that the location of 72 was appropriate because it would allow over 10,000 people in the Grand Plaza to be able to see the new leader rise mysteriously from the bundle of bones of the old one, and to see the dozens of girls facing their executioners fall backward into the pit after being clubbed to death, their feet still touching the wall of the pit when they were discovered centuries later.Another mound near Monks Mound was used to bury the garbage left by the periodic feasts held for the entire population. 10,000 people, 4,000 deer at a time, hundreds of clay pots with the remains of corn and pumpkin still in them, a million seeds of highly hallucinogenic tobacco smoked by the participants, all for one feast. The remains of eight other feasts were in the same pit, and when it as unearthed, having been oxygen-free for eight hundred years, much was preserved and it smelled really bad when archaeologists explored it.I wish that the book had illustrations. When I read about the cave paintings found in Wisconsin in 1974 by a teen-aged boy, clearly Cahokian in style and characters depicted, I went to the Internet to find and print out these images. They were astounding! And the art style was CLEARLY influenced by Mesoamerican art. I have another book about Cahokia with drawings of the burials in Mound 72, sketches of the skeletons, the men with hands and heads cut off to guard the 52 young sacrificed virgins, the two leaders buried on top of each other, the cache of chunkey stones, arrows, chunkey sticks encased in copper sheeting, etc. It would be wonderful it this book included all the maps and illustrations available and referenced in one volume.The artifacts found in Cahokia feature male gods and male imagery. Pauketat has a chapter on goddess artifacts found at the sites of farms around Cahokia, where the inhabitants ate very little meat from large animals (unlike at Cahokia), but just frogs, birds, mice, and similar. Also raised a lot of questions.This is incredible, and very few know about it. The state of Illinois should give the site millions to make it something everyone in the US learns about in school and everyone in the area should visit it once it had a lot more explanatory exhibits and maybe performances. A chunkey game definitely. Maybe a movie of what they believe the mortuary theater production was like. A restaurant serving Cahokia-style food. A children's area to help children make headdresses and characteristic drawings. A much-better stocked gift shop. Possibly eventually restore Monks Mound at least to what it was at its height, covered with clay, probably black, but some of the other mounds are believed to have been covered with blue or red clay. Rebuild the temple buildings on top. They should have a display showing a replica of what was found in Mound 72 nearby: at the least show the leader buried on the thunderbird cape embroidered with 10,000 shell beads, with his alter ego buried face down underneath him. Show the dozens of chunkey stones, sticks, arrows and other artifacts buried near them. There were hundreds of white-tipped arrows facing north-west (azimuth, the alignment of the rising sun at the solstice, rather than the north-south orientation of all buildings except the ridge-top burial mounds) at the top of the group of artifacts, because white was the color of life and the sky. There were hundreds of multi- or black-tipped arrows (just the heads remained) at the bottom of the group, because black was the color of death and the underworld. Some representation of the servants and girls sacrificed to accompany them to the underworld.Pauketat gives a lot of evidence supporting the hypothesis that Cahokia was influenced by Mesoamerican cultures. Only one artifact from Mesoamerica has been found (not at Cahokia), a splinter of obsidian undeniably from Mesoamerica, but the numerous other similarities have to mean there were some who traveled back and forth. Some of the figures in rock art clearly show Aztec influence. The god with the long hooked and upturned nose is so unusual and similar to the Mayan rain god Chaac that I don't think it could have arisen spontaneously. The logo for the site has a hooked nose which I think is a hawk beak.The site should have a room about chunkey, with chunkey stones found at the site (exquisitely carved discs with both flat sides concave), replicas of chunkey sticks, explanations of the religious and cultural significance, the wild popularity for betting EVERYTHING on the outcome, what European explorers observed of it, maybe modern players putting on a game for tourists every day like at Xcaret. A room on Mound 72, with displays showing cross-sections of what was uncovered and models of the most interesting finds. A room showing replicas of the some of the garbage and artifacts found in the trash dump mound and what it says about their diet, cooking, and celebrations. A room on the art work of the Mississippians (smoking pipes, figurines, pots, and cave paintings) and the areas which adopted their art styles, including what we have learned about their religion and their legends. Why was it so attractive that so many Indian tribes were converted to it by emissaries sent far and wide? The mounds, and how likely it is that they were influenced by the stone pyramids of Mesoamerica. The numbers they favored were those also favored by the Mesoamericans. 52, for instance, was important in the Aztec calendar. The huge influence this culture had on most of the rest of what is now the US, how and why so many other Indian tribes sought to imitate it. And what happened to it. It just disappeared suddenly, without even any legends which might explain its disappearance among other Indian tribes. Deliberate silencing of something too traumatic to recall? No one knows.The friend who went with us said that it seemed as though the site museum were promoting an image of the city as peaceful and happy, no strife, very politically correct. But if the reality is as reality always is, power struggles, warfare, violence, then why not recognize it, depict it, and think about it? This site is North America's Teotihuacán or Tenochtitlán. If everyone else in North and South America was engaged in constant political maneuvering for power, using religious ideology as support, why in the world would the largest city of Indians in all of North America not have had similar dynamics to those in Mesoamerica? There is no doubt that they brought innumerable shells for beads and jewelry from the Gulf of Mexico and east Florida: it seems obvious that there must have been some travelers who made the journey up along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from further south, bringing ideas and stories even if they didn't bring trade goods.Pauketat explains that in the '70s and '80s the major paradigm in archeological cultural interpretations was that the particular environment completely controlled all aspects of the cultural groups which lived in it. I think maybe this is what has influenced those who have developed the Interpretation Center at Cahokia Mounds, educated at that time, to focus on replicas of the huts rather than on the many aspects of the culture which we know about which allowed it to become so huge and so influential across most of the US. Aspects which were spiritual, ideological, rooted in beliefs about what shaped the world and gave it meaning, rather than what enabled mere survival.

For a beginning, I would recommend Cahokia Mounds: America’s FIrst City by William Iseminger (ignoring the confusion of America with the USA in the subtitle) which is much less conjectural, more basic, and does a better job in conveying the fundamentals to a general audience. That said, this book is interesting in its own right, and there is very little overlap between the two. This author is much more expansive. Of special interest to me, among many other additional topics covered, he relates what the earliest European visitors saw. I am not an expert, but some of his conjectures seemed, to me, to be a little to far fetched, hence the 4 stars.

Over the course of my life I'd heard about "Mound Builders", about a city somewhere in the Mid-West built by Indians, and seen a few odd photos of objects found in the mounds that were located out there somewhere. I never really put it all together. Now, thanks, to this excellent review of the knowledge that we have of that surprising development in America's ancient history, I feel that I have a basic grasp of what happened---or at least what archaeologists THINK happened. With no written records and precious little data to go on, archaeologists have gathered an amazingly complex picture of the sudden appearance of Cahokia, a large town (or for that time, city, surrounded by farms and villages, not far from modern St. Louis across the Mississippi River in Illinois. It had a huge plaza, pyramids topped with houses, a large collection of other buildings, and horrifying mass burials of sacrificed humans. Why did this city suddenly rise around the year 1054 ? Was there any connection to the supernova that was visible then ? Why also did it disappear about 150 years later ? Where did the people go ? Was there any connection to a particular religion ? How did the people live ? What role did women have ? What kind of rulers did they have? How far did Cahokia's influence spread ? Was there any connection to Mexico or to the ancient mound builders of Louisiana ? Archeologists have tried to answer these and many other questions. Pauketat has summed up our knowledge so far as well as described the actual research methods and efforts. Nineteenth century America never was much in the mood for Indian civilizations. Interstate highways and interchanges, not to mention cheap tract housing in the 20th century, nearly obliterated all evidence. People destroyed a huge amount of potential information before governments finally took a concerned interest and stopped the bulldozers. Nobody knows what was lost. Anthropologists have added to our knowledge by combing through the legends of such Mid-Western and Plains tribes as the Sioux, Pawnee, Ho-Chunk, Sauk, Osage, and Iowa, trying to connect stories with objects or ancient memories. The results are tantalizing but scarce. While descriptions of the various researchers may be superfluous, they are interesting too. Anyway, if archaeology, American history, and Native American culture interest you, you can't miss this book.

This is a good starter book for someone new to the subject of Cahokia. I got this book after listening to the author on a podcast. This stuff is in my backyard so to speak so it opened up places to visit and see first hand.

Nice book overall but a boring read in large parts.Imagine wanting to read about Rome and you buy a book and it talks a lot about how the ruins of Rome were first noticed and had a lot of history about the archaeologists who dug up the ruins and less information about what they actually found. And, then a lot, underline a lot, of speculation about what it all means.I am being a bit unfair because not a lot IS known about these people. They had no written language and they came and went like a flash in the pan. But, still, who needs the speculation.I would read the Wikpedia entry about this culture along with this book.All in all, I am glad I read the book but this is not a keeper. I am motivated though to go visit the State park which encompasses some of their ruins.

For a very reasonable price an efficient seller has sent me a book I would have liked to read many, many years ago. Anyone interested in the history of North America before the first European settlers arrived needs to read this.Although every paragraph is stuffed full of information the book is very easy to read. There is nothing complicated or obscure in the way the author provides readers with knowledge. It's the opposite of sitting in a lecture hall while a bored and boring academic mumbles about his opinion on the subject rather than speaking clearly about the facts and their most likely interpretations. The language in this book is clear and uncomplicated, making the interest I found in it leap out of the words. I'm too old to want to work hard to learn!Over the ages many snobbish academics have poured their scorn on self-education. When self-education is this well-researched, this complete, and presented as well as this there is no reason to pour scorn on it.A great gift for anyone interested in the history of North America, including yourself.

Ce livre est très intéressant et riche d'informations. Il parle d'une part d'histoire méconnu des Etats Unis, avec ces sites archéologiques aux nombreuses pyramides et de ces royaumes Amérindiens, dans la lignée des sites Mexicains, Aztèques, Maya et autres.Toutefois, il requiert un bon niveau d'Anglais pour bénéficier de la qualité de cet ouvrage.Ce qui est dommage, c'est qu'il manque de photos et d'illustrations pour enrichir cet ouvrage.

Fine. Everything as expected.