On the basis of the previous observations, it is possible to describe a historical process that charts shifts in social interaction that prefigure some of the forms recognizable in an established urban setting. The development of a new gustatory etiquette, together with changes to the engine of vested economic power, testifies to the strength of the effects of the urban setting on human action and vice versa. These
Reasons alone are sufficient to justify a consideration of Cahokia as a site that evolved toward fully urban life. The text for this process is encoded in the cosmology as expressed in the rituals undertaken by the corporate groups that lived in this urban landscape. Such an emblematically conceived "fresh start" of a macro-community construction fulfills an important criterion for cities - that is, they are more than simply villages or towns writ large. After 1050 AD, Cahokia was designed to accommodate the integration of the major corporate groups by assigning each a role in the implementation of its cosmic charter.
Although we cannot directly access the minds of the Cahokians, we can gain insight into the purpose and meaning of their settlement plan by interpreting the site's structure and features through the cosmology of related Native American groups, such as the Osage and Omaha, Dhegihan-Siouan speaking groups wIth origins in the Ohio River Valley, or the Chickasaw of the southeast (Bailey 1995, 2010; Burns 2004, 2005; Knight 1998; O'Shea and Ludwickson 1992; Welsch 1981). The knowledge of the cosmos that resided historically among groups such as the Osage was carefully partitioned among the religious specialists or priests of each kin group (Bailey 1995). Each clan was responsible for the knowledge that resided in their portion of the cosmos. In order for a specific ritual to work, it was necessary for the religious agents of each clan to come together with what they knew and create what was necessary. Although this renDition of Dhegiha Siouan cosmology belongs to the late nineteenth century AD, there is reason to think that this convention extended back to places such as Cahokia that have been connected with early Dhegihan society (Brown 2011; Kelly 2006). It is important to remember that Cahokia probably represents the ancestral roots of the descendant Dhegihan-speaking societies. Although the speciics have changed over the centuries, the principles remain intact and are critical in the production of public space that is aT the city's core.
The principles that underlie urban planning of Cahokia are embeddeD in its epicenter. Paraphrasing the Osage, Garrick Bailey (1995) states that the cosmos was encoded in their community and society. The principles of reciprocity represented by dualism reflect the various elements within society and the cosmos that were in a constant state of opposition; in the end, these principles resulted in an effort to attain a balance or harmony of the whole and were thus in
A constant state of negotiation. Large mounds are paired with small mounds. The dichotomy created by these pairings of unequal size reflects an important indigenous principle that focuses on maintaining a balance in the cosmos; night versus day; male versus female; large versus small; and so forth. A similar pairing is evident on the West Plaza. The square platform is placed opposite a circular conical mound, one on the east, the other to the west, respectively; or, in other instances, the former to the south and the latter to the north. Like a mountain, Monks Mound rises above the surrounding four plazas - flat expanses of space that created an arena in which people came together to negotiate with their past and to ensure societal continuity for the future.
CAHOKIA
The four mounds that demarcate the NorTh Plaza (Figure 9.10) accentuate spatially the size, distance, and directionality of this landscape. Given their position within the Edelhardt meander at a lower elevation than the other plazas, they can be seen as being tethered to the underworld and to the origins of the earth in the selection of sediments of different colors and sources that appear to have been dictated by mythological associations. The earth diver, a mythical creature common in Native American origin stories, is one such connection (Kongas 1960). In this case, the earth diver assists in the creation of the earth by diving beneath the primordial waters to retrieve muck from the aquatic floor (Hall 1997). Black mucky soils are occasionally inter-layered with light-colored soils in Monks Mound. It is believed that much of the earth was removed in this area to construct Monks Mound (Kelly et al. 2007b).
The four plazas with their attendant mounds reflect the principle of quadrilateralism. In ethnographic texts, four is a sacred number that points in the direction of the universe with the rising and setting of the sun each day in the east and west, respectively (Bailey 1995). The NorTh Plaza is placed within the watery matrix of the Edelhardt meander. In the earth-diver origin stories discussed earlier, it is from this watery world that mud is collected to establish life. It is from this area that we suspect that mud was taken to create Monks Mound. To the south is death, as represented in the twin mounds at the south end of the Grand Plaza and beyonD this is an earlier mortuary display of death in Mound 72 wIth four headless and handless males marking the center (Fowler et al. 1999). Beyond this is the largest mortuary structure, the Harding, or Rattlesnake Mound (Fowler 1997; Moorehead 1929; Pauketat and Barker 2000)
Placed within and rising out of a watery matrix where life begins. Mound 72 is not wholly about sacrifices, but as Brown (2003, 2006) has noted, a performance that reenacts the origins of the cosmos in the initial mound. Indigenous groups saw death as part of an intergenerational cycle. It is this geometric form - the circle - that encapsulates the continuum of life and death.
A hallmark of urban settlement complexity is the partitioning of space into places for dedicated purposes. At Cahokia, plazas, courtyards, residential areas, mounds, and other specialized architecture - such as the woodhenge - had their predetermined locations. Some of these locations, and perhaps all, were determined by cosmological order, in the vein oF the Omaha summer-camp circle that will be described (Ridington and Hastings 1997). For our purposes, the plaza is the most important space to be discussed. Each of the four plazas aT the heart of Cahokia are defined by large, open spaces bounded by mounds placed at the edges. In general, plazas are an integral part of the architectural space of Mississippian mound centers or towns and have a long history in the Eastern Woodlands going bacK into the Archaic period. Plazas continued into the historic period and are an integral part of traditional ceremonies of Indian communities today, as seen in southeastern Indian towns of the past. Although these communities, called talwa in the Creek Indian language, exist as a dispersed settlement pattern, they maintain a ritual/public center consisting of a town square or square ground. Thus, among Southeastern tribes, space for community activities occupies a conspicuous location and sacred sanctions are usually invoked in public rituals. Consequently, the places where such rituals are performed has to be ritually purified and declared off-limits to women and outsiders (Swanton 1931). These rituals create townwide cohesion through appeal to the sacred. The plazas of Cahokia may have hosted similar rituals for both local inhabitants and the larger regional community.
Certain studies of urbanism have used selected spatial relationships as their guide to understanding this process of urbanization. Examples include viewsheds, visual orientation, metriication, and geometric relationships (e. g., Dalan et al. 2003). At Cahokia, objects of orientation - or the key architectural building units - are Monks Mound at the center, platform mounds generally, ridge-top mounds, conical mounds, large posts, and plazas. At a larger scale, the geometric arrangement of the epicenter and its celestial orientation become
Important. Surrounding the epicenter lies a sprawling, yet structured and organized occupation of domestic dwellings and smaller, peripheral plazas and courtyards, as evident in the Interpretive Center Tract-II (Collins 1990, 1997) and Tract 15-A (Pauketat 1998) (see Figures 9.3 And 9.6c). Residences are dispersed around courtyards and orientated along the epicenter axes, especially in the early part of the sequence.
Cahokia
Cosmology, Feasting, anD the "Big Bang"
The major event of about 1050 AD, the so-called Big Bang, appears to mark the time when a sudden influx of people entered Cahokia from the surrounding region and, to a limited extent, from other nearby regions. It is possible that astronomical events provided some impetus for this cultural change (Beck et al. 2007) among people whose descendants, in ethnographic texts, were keen observers of celestial events, which they viewed as omens. Kelly (1996a) speculated on the possibility that the appearance of Haley's comet around the time of the spring equinox at 1066 coincided with the Big-Bang. Pauketat (2009; Pauketat and Loren 2005:17) suggests a link between the Big Bang and a 1054 supernova first noted by Diaz-Granados and Duncan (2000) in the rock art of eastern Missouri. It is also important to note that the largest supernova to be recorded historically appeared in the spring of 1006 AD and continued to be present intermittently for the next three years (Stephenson 2002). We have no clear material correlates of the 1006 event, but the appearance of these asterisms ties in with the elite-centered imagery of Morning Star depicted in rock art from Picture Cave in east-central Missouri (Diaz-Granados and Duncan 2000; Diaz-Granados et al. 2001) and Gottschall rock shelter in southwestern Wisconsin (Salzer and Rajnovich 2001), both of which date to around 1000 AD.
Regardless of the possible role of astronomical events in sparking the Big Bang, this influx of people may be related in part to the scheduling of annual community-wide feasts at a central location (Kelly 2008a, 2008c). The ability of leaders to host such large-scale events for the region and beyond at Cahokia may have stemmed in part from the high productivity of nearby soils (Schroeder 1999, 2004). The felds represented the most important resource that certain kin groups at Cahokia and adjacent communities may have controlled. Thus, food represents one commodity that could be
Used to draw others beyond the immediate sphere to participate not only in its consumption and the attendant rituals, but what others bring to the so-called table - that is Cahokia - in the way of raw materials and finished products. In sum, the local abundance of food becomes an important factor in attracting to Cahokia a population living well beyond the immediate vicinity. As a consequence, the feasts would not only reinforce the political power of the hosts, but they would mark Cahokia as the font of the largess and, by extension, the place where the spiritual power to produce food can be accessed (Byers 2006). This system, with its roots in the late Emergent Mississippian period, involved social groups from the family level up to the level of the community as a whole, with an initial invitation that extended in all four sacred directions beyond the region.
Cosmic Foundations
Interpreted on the basis oF the ethnographic principles described here, Cahokian society incorporated multiple corporate groups through community ritual enacted within a purpose-built environment. These groups not only created this space, but also negotiated how that space was configured and employed to represent their vision of the larger cosmos. As we will demonstrate, this process, well rooted in local traditions, represented a rapid and dynamic implementation of a corporate vision involving the creation of a four-fold multiplication of the quadrilateral plaza configuration (Figure 9.2) that recreated the cosmos by tying them to a common center (Beck et al. 2007; Kelly 1996a) (see Howard 1968; Lankford 2007). There is not only a horizontal dimension to the production of space, formalizing the relationships between individuals and the groups they are part of, but also a distinct vertical dimension that is in concordance with the multilayered cosmos (Lankford 2007). This verticality is not necessarily translated into social standing. The horizontal dimensions of the world they live in are connected through an axial center (axis mundi) from the lower worlds beneath the earth's surface to the empyrean or upper world, above the sky. The creation of these different levels serves to place people with respect to the major spiritual forces represented, for example, by the sun on the one hand and the deities of the sky on the other hand (Brown 2011).
Historically, each clan of Mississippian native groups was symbolically represented within the village structure. The camp circle of the Omaha tribe represents one material version oF this representation (Fletcher and LaFlesche 1911). The religious edifice known as the "House of Mystery" orders clans on a smaller scale among the Osage (Bailey 1995). As large public places, Cahokia's plazas honor the four sacred directions and are unified by a program of monumen-tality. Investigations by a number of different researchers provide insights into them as part of the cityscape with different architectural elements that comprise each plaza. The plazas are more than diagrammatic inscriptions on the landscape. Knight (1998) argued that the spatial organization of Moundville resembled the square ground of the Chickasaw Indians. We build on this insight to argue that plazas, particularly sunken plazas, articulate with mounds to form a vertical dimension to the surface arrangement of plazas and mounds. At Cahokia, two central plazas were sunken (the Grand Plaza and Ramey Plaza) to provide what can be regarded as an architectural way of displaying a tiered universe - this world of the cruciform plan, the beneath world of the sunken plazas, and the upper world of the summit of Monks Mound. Other levels could also be represented. The Osage believed that there were an aDditional four worlds placed between this world and the empyrean (Duncan 2011; ReIlly 2004).
World History
