The 'City of the Sun' is the theme of the Interpretive Center at Cahokia, a World Heritage site located just east of St. Louis, Missouri. Although the site's sociopolitical complexity and degree of centralization have
Received substantial discussion (Holt 2009; Pauketat 2004, 2007) remarkably little has been devoted to Cahokia as a city. O'Brien (1972), using Childe's (1950) criteria, was perhaps the first to argue that Cahokia was a city. She also followed Childe's link between urbanism and state-level society, consistently arguing for Cahokia being a state (O'Brien 1989, 1992; see also Gibbon 1974 and, for a more recent novel perspective, HoLt 2009). The early writings of Fowler (1974, 1975, 1976) and a more recent volume (Young and Fowler 2000) often allude to Cahokia as a city, with particular emphasis on the alignments and axes that undergird the site's spatial arrangement (Morgan 1980; Rolingson 1996; Sherrod and Rolingson 1987).
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O'Brien's perspective received renewed emphasis from Kehoe (1998:169), who not only advocated the site as the center of a state, but who has also consistently argued that both Chaco and Cahokia were basically derived from the Toltec Empire of central Mexico during its apogee between 900-1200 AD. Although there is little significant interaction between the southwest and Cahokia, there is even less between Cahokia and Mexico (Brown 2004; Brown and Kelly 2012; Hall 1989). There is no question thaT ideological parallels exist in the latter case and that some form of interaction was being maintained (Brown and Kelly 2012; Hall 2006), yet Cahokia remains an indigenous development together wIth the rest of Mississippian culture.
Several historians - including Roger Kennedy, Francis Jennings, and William Swagerty - have also provided perspectives on Cahokia as a city, "metropolis," or "empire" (Jennings 1993:64-65; Kennedy 1994; Swagerty 2000), whereas other recent volumes on Cahokia discuss its complexity to varying degrees (Chappell 2002; Dalan 1993; Dalan et al. 2003). Pauketat (2004, 2007, 2009) has followed in the earlier footsteps of O'Brien and Kehoe in pushing the level of the site's sociopolitical complexity to a point beyond what can be supported by extant data, especially when it is asserted mainly because Cahokia is large. Iseminger (2010), following Smith's recent work on degrees of urban planning and the key features of cities (Smith 2002, 2007) treats Cahokia as "America's First City," echoing Pfeiffer's (1973, 1974) use of this label decades earlier.
Large, complex sites in North America are generally considered incapable of contributing to the study of ancient cities. In the Eastern Woodlands, the emergence of urbanism is commonly denied or basically ignored (Welch 2004) although the region is known for its long tradition of earthen monumental architecture. Southeastern
Archaeologists, in fact, go out of their way not to describe Cahokia as a city, but instead as a "mega-center" or Great Town (Holley 1999). Although Cahokia, the largest site in eastern North America, is sometimes thought of as urban, it is just as often dismissed as a standard temple-town settlement wrIt large. The general lack of discussion about Cahokia as a city is indicative of the discomfort that many archaeologists have with the idea. We advocate examining the problem in an unaccustomed way. Instead of judging the merits of the urban label with definitive criteria in a checklist or trait list, it is more worthwhile, generally speaking, to think of urbanism as a process in which no definitive line exists to separate non-cities from cities. Consequently, many of the distinguishing traits of cities are ones that emerge or develop in more differentiated ways during the expansion of large, internally diversified central places througH the social production of space.
For Amerindians of the mid-continent, it is not until the eleventh century AD that the process of urbanization becomes clearly identifiable near St. Louis in the central Mississippi Valley. The nature of these changes in community aggregation and nucleation over a period of 500 years ultimately is the foundation of Cahokia (Kelly 1992). The creation of Cahokia and its configuration as a city may have been the inspiration for urban centers that developed elsewhere in the Midwest and Southeast (cf. Pauketat 2004, 2007), such as Moundville (Knight anD Steponaitis 1998), where parallel but slightly later developmental processes appear to have been well underway. Beginning in the twelfth century, smaller nucleated settlements, traditionally referred to by indigenous Muskogean peoples as talwas or towns, emerged at the core of most southeastern polities (Ethridge 2003:96).
In many respects, the Mississippian world can be visualized as an example of incipient urbanism, and arguably a pristine case of development within the Eastern Woodlands of North America. Certainly, Mississippian towns are more than large villages with mounds; they are planned residential communities with large central plazas and monumental architecture such as mounds, public buildings, and in many instances, wooden fortification walls (see Lewis and Stout 1998). What makes this important to understanding developments on a global scale is the short-lived nature of the Mississippian tradition (i. e., five centuries) and thus the lack of a long, drawn-out history of urbanization compared with many other parts of the world. It
Is extremely difficult at this time to investigate the onset of urbanism in these other areas through plans of excavated cities, but Cahokia's relatively short chronology provides a unique opportunity to analyze this process.
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We choose to address the process of urbanism at Cahokia from the inhabitants' points of view by interpreting the built environment through the lens of ethnographic records from the region. Although we cannot capture the expectations, motivations, and adjustment strategies of living in large communities, we can make use of aspects oF the material record, both major and minor, that reflect the agency of those that inhabit any major aggregation. What impresses us most is the strength of multigenerational trends that measure a group's material response to the challenge of continued close living. The cultural structures "inhabited" by groups at all social and political levels have moments of conscious creation - "events" in Sewell's terms - in which structural transformation is achieved through the addition of a new structural element (Sewell 2005).
Throughout its nearly four centuries of history, Cahokia reveals a dynamic interplay between its size and the production of differentiated space. This makes Cahokia particularly appropriate for the theme of how space in cities is configured and socially produced. Our primary focus in this chapter is the epicenter that dominates the heart of this Amerindian community (Figure 9.2). Covering nearly 150 ha, this is an area much larger than most ancient cities elsewhere in the world. The principles that underlie the creation of Cahokia's heart are those embedded in Amerindian communities historically and are intricately linked to their cosmology.
World History
