As North America's only pre-Columbian city, Cahokia represents a unique configuration characterized some fifty years after its outset by four quadrilateral plazas centered on Monks Mound. This ritualized core of large earthen platform mounds, large constructed plazas, and massive wooden architecture comprises a landscape encompassing more than 100 ha. This built environment is at the heart of a ritual city covering nearly 15 km2 and has its roots in the site's late-Emergent Mississippian community. This chapter focuses on the processes leading to the creation of this urban space and the American Indian cosmological principles that underlie them.
Only in the last few decades has the definition of urbanism been broadened to accommodate large and socially diversified Amerindian settlements that lack the political apparatus of the state or the stimulus of market-driven economies. At the same time, the finding has been generally accepted that cities emerged independently in a number of areas of the world. In many cases of pristine development, urbanism was sustained - often for millennia (Marcus and Sabloff 2008; Smith 2003). But what of those that faltered early and fell short of sustained growth? For any understanding of the processes of urbanism, it is precisely these areas that offer crucial information about the inception of the process. Cahokia (Figure 9.1) is a place that offers just such a window and one that comes from eastern North America, an area that has yet to contribute to a comprehensive picture on the origins of urbanism. In the following discussion, we focus on the processes leading to the creation of Cahokia and the American Indian cosmological principles that structure its space.
Recent comparative studies (Cowgill 2004; Smith 2002, 2007) have effectively disengaged the city from its timeworn role as a marker
Figure 9.1 (a) Map of the American Bottom (base map adapted from Bushnell 1922); (b) plan of central Cahokia (base map adapted from Mink
1999:27).
CAHOKIA
Of the state and a market economy. As a result, the number of places now defined as ancient cities has blossomed. As part of this rethinking, Fletcher (2009) has pointed to the presence of "low density, agrarian urbanism" in different parts of the globe. In discussing the early stages of urbanism in the Middle Niger in West Africa and the Late Neolithic along the Yellow River of northeast China, McIntosh (1991, 2005) has proposed the concept of "urban cluster" to describe
Large settlements in which monumental architecture is not present. Heckenberger and his colleagues (2008) have argued that the large (ca. 30-50 ha) pre-Columbian communities of the Amazon Basin are urban and part of a "galactic" settlement system. Michael Smith (2002, 2007) has pinpointed internal site planning and the relationship a site has to its hinterland as especially critical to what defines a city.
By removing the city as a defining element of the state, research in the ancient Americas has moved away from traditional models of cities and has instead focused on the role of religion, ritual, cosmology, anD ideology as important elements in the creation and configuration of the city (Ashmore 1991), as well as how these cities articulate with smaller communities within the region. We argue here that with respect to site plan, scale, monumentality, and a socially differentiated hinterland, Cahokia merits serious consideration as being a city. We believe it is important to lay out the basis for defining Cahokia's urban character with attention to its historical antecedents and Amerindian cosmological principles (Kelly 1996a). In what follows, we first review the context of the debate over Cahokia's status as a city and then describe in detail its physical structure. Finally, we interpret Cahokia's structure and meaning in light of ethnohis-toric and ethnographic data. Key features of Cahokia that we consider in our analysis include the horizontal organization of plazas and mounds, the vertical differentiation between sunken plazas and elevated platforms and mounds, the pairing of mounds, the removal of soil, and the use of specific kinds of soils in the construction of the site's monuments. In these features, we see the hands of different corporate groups in Cahokian society (Saitta 1994; Trubitt 2000) whose actions cemented sociopolitical relationships and emphasized group identity even as they competed to make their mark on urban space. Our application of indigenous beliefs and meaning to Cahokia from ethnographic sources cannot be fully corroborated by archaeological data, but we believe that our interpretations are well-grounded possibilities that enrich an understanding of the city.
World History
