By AD 1000, Cahokia was a major center of trade, shops and crafts, and religious and political activities. It was the first true urban center in what is now the United States. By 1150, at the height of its development, it covered six square miles and had more than
15.000 inhabitants.
The earthworks at Cahokia included some twenty huge mounds around a downtown plaza, with another 100 large mounds in the outlying areas. The largest mound was 110 feet high, covered fourteen acres, and contained 20 million cubic yards of earth. It was probably the largest earthen structure in the Americas. Atop the mound was a fifty-foot-high wood-framed temple.
Cahokian society was characterized by sharp class divisions. The elite lived in larger homes and consumed a better and more varied diet (their garbage pits included bones from the best cuts of meat). The corpse of one chieftain was buried upon a bed of
20.000 beaded shells; nearby was a long piece of shaped copper from Lake Superior, several bushels of bird and animal sculptures made of mica, and over
1.000 arrows, many with beautiful quartz or obsidian points. Near the chieftain’s bones were the skeletons of fifty women ranging from eighteen to twenty-three years old, likely sacrifices to the gods. Their bones were genetically different from the Cahokian skeletons, suggesting that the young women were captives in war or tribute sent by vassal states.
That the Cahokia had enemies is confirmed by the existence of a three-mile-long wooden palisade surrounding the central core of the city. It consisted of 20,000 enormous tree trunks, pounded deep into the ground, interspersed with several dozen watch-towers from which defenders could unloose arrows upon besiegers.
In the central plaza of Cahokia, skilled workers carved religious figurines from quartz, mica, and galena. Others painted similar symbols on pottery or etched them in copper goods. Lesser chieftains brought corn and other foodstuffs into Cahokia, perhaps as tribute, while the Cahokia rulers reciprocated with gifts of
An artist's rendering shows downtown Cahokia, around 1150 CE. Cahokia was surrounded by a palisade, made of enormous tree trunks (far left). On the great mounds within, the elite built homes and performed the ceremonial tasks of Mississippian culture. The open space in the center was probably filled with the stalls of craftspeople.
Figurines and copper or, in times of famine, grants of surplus corn. In Cahokia, too, priest-astronomers scrutinized the movements of the sun, moon, and stars.
Cahokia dominated a region of several hundred miles. Smaller mound-building communities emerged throughout the eastern woodlands and the Southeast. Two of the largest were Moundville, Alabama, and Etowah, Georgia. Cahokia also established (or perhaps inspired) distant satellite communities. Around AD 800, Mississippian Indians moved into southern Wisconsin and built Aztalan (in what is now Jefferson County), with similar corn storage depots and large ceremonial mounds surrounding a central plaza.
Like Cahokia, Aztalan erected a massive tree-trunk palisade with watchtowers. Archaeologists have found burned and butchered body parts throughout the ruins, evidence of warfare. Some speculate that the corn-growing Mississippians encroached on the Oneota, a hunting and gathering people, and that the communities long remained hostile.
The Mississippian elites did more than supervise construction of their own massive earthen tombs. They also solved complicated problems of political and social organization.
World History
