Despite the reluctance of Eastern Woodlands archaeologists to adopt the position that Cahokia is a city, we join with students of the general topic in seeing essential aspects of urbanism at Cahokia. Beginning with a crossed-shaped plan of four plazas, the site was clearly, by the end, partitioned internally with a walled precinct, craft specialization took place in both secular and sacred contexts, an art style was reined, and a hinterland was drawn to its service. Although the limits of this settlement seem messy, recent reviews of low-density agrarian seTtlements make clear that compact cities are something of an exception (Fletcher 2009). It is the structural and functional differentiation of the community and its relationship to the extra-settlement catchment that make the city.
Viewing Cahokia as a city has the benefit of addressing the internal social and economic structure of the site and its hinterland along useful lines. The central Monks Mound was created to define the city architecturally and to unite each of the plazas within an ideologically potent plan. It allows us to examine the creative role of the plaza organization, which fixed the place of constituent groups
Within an ideologically sanctioned overarching scheme. The mound architecture associated with these groups would stand as a visible materialization of each lineage's ability to muster resources and to declare its potency to succeeding generations. If historic uses of the cult oF the Sacred Hawk among the Osage are any guide to past beliefs, it would appear that its Birdman-centered corollary dealt directly with the propagation of one's lineage. Once extinct, the lineage's monuments would testify to their former relative importance in a permanent way. The strength of this city organization is testi-hed by the appearance midway in its history of regularity in household size and economic potency. After 1200 AD, larger households came to dominate the acquisition and deposition of exotics so that the amount of exotics is more closely related to the size of the associated building. A weakness in the organizational structure lay in the inability of the collective format to survive the emergence of an overt hierarchy in an unconstrained environment. Any challenge to the collectivity would promote breakup along factional lines.
Although our interpretations of the meaning of Cahokia's structure rely heavily on ethnographic data, cultural continuity during the 400 years between the time of Cahokia's demise and the earliest ethnohistoric texts and the more recent ethnographies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes it possible to provide reasonable explanations for the planning principles evident at CahoKia. Archaeological evidence for feasting, mortuary practices, household change over time, regional settlement restructuring, and monuments that were carefully built and maintained, dovetail with ethnographic accounts of the cosmic order in the ancient American Indian settlements of the Cahokian region. In light of the scale and complexity of this planning, along with the socioeconomic and religious factors described here, we argue that in Cahokia, we see the expression of Native North American urbanism - a process that was not taken up at the same scale as Cahokia in subsequent periods, leaving the (false) impression that North America lacks ancient cities. We further argue that this is an incipient and pristine example of the emergence of urbanism in the Eastern Woodlands of North America.
World History
