Cahokia

Cahokia, a city at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, near modern-day St. Louis, had from 10,000 to 30,000 inhabitants in the 12th century A. D.

The Indian builders and inhabitants of Cahokia shared a cultural pattern that scholars have named Mississippian. Mississippian sites have been identified as far north as Wisconsin and as far south as Alabama. Although cultural traits varied from place to place, Mississippians lived in towns and practiced maize (corn) agriculture. Important religious symbols included crosses with a circle in the center, sun symbols, human skulls, and birds. Some Mississippian peoples practiced human sacrifice.

Cahokia covered an area of roughly five square miles. The town included more than 100 earth mounds, the significance of which is not entirely clear. The largest of these, Monks Mound, was a pyramidal structure about 1,000 feet long and 775 feet wide covering an area of more than 17 acres. It was built in a series of terraces, with the top level about 100 feet above the ground. Until the arrival of Europeans, it was the largest man-made structure north of Mexico.

Burial evidence suggests that a distinct social hierarchy existed. Commoners were buried with few or no grave goods, while elites were buried with large quantities of exotic items and might be accompanied by sacrificed humans. In one of Cahokia’s platform mounds, excavators discovered the remains of an elite male. His body was laid on a platform of about 20,000 shell beads. Other grave goods included a sheet of rolled copper, mica, hundreds of unused arrowheads, and other items. These grave goods suggest that Cahokians participated in a trade network that extended for thousands of miles. The copper in the grave apparently came from the area of Lake Superior, the mica from North Carolina, and the stone for the arrowheads from as far away as Tennessee and Oklahoma. The grave also contained bundles of bones and the disarticulated remains of other individuals. Near the body were the remains of three men and three women, possibly sacrificed to accompany the dead man. In a nearby pit the remains of more than 50 young women placed side by side and stacked one on another suggest a mass sacrifice, as do the bodies of four men without heads or hands.

The structure of Cahokian society and the extent of its influence remain mysterious. Some scholars have theorized that Cahokia exercised direct political and military control over both nearby and distant populations. Later scholars have argued that Cahokia, though an important political, cultural, and religious center, did not have the resources to be a major military power or exercise direct control over distant peoples.

Cahokia was abandoned in the 15th century for reasons that remain obscure. The construction of defensive palisades suggests that the city was threatened by enemies. Environmental factors probably played a significant role. Some evidence suggests a period of especially hot, dry summers that may have hastened the exhaustion of the surrounding farmland. The Cahokians also may have depleted their supply of readily available firewood. The fate of the Cahokians is unknown. It is likely that they assimilated into various surrounding Indian populations rather than forming the direct ancestors of any particular Indian nation. Much about Cahokia remains mysterious. The inhabitants left behind no written language, and many of the mounds have been destroyed by erosion, quarrying, plowing, and urban development.

Yet despite the ongoing mystery of the disappearance (or more likely dispersal) of its occupants, Cahokia continues to hold fascination for visitors. Thomas Jefferson, in the years after his presidency, was fascinated by an archaeological report from Cahokia, which opened his mind to the extent of pre-European settlement in the West. Yet despite the site’s appeal to scholars, some 19th-century American settlers decided that the mounds should not get in the way of their farms, so they settled among them. They did so, no doubt, because the soil in the floodplain, periodically replenished by overflow from the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, was ideal for their crops. Into the 20th century the area continued to attract people who found it suitable for their houses. Only in recent decades has the site begun to return to what it looked like after the dispersal of its indigenous occupants. The wooden dwellings that once surrounded the mounds are long gone, but not the mounds themselves. From atop Monks Mound it is possible to imagine one of the great attractions of the area: On a clear day the view extends for miles, reminding one that this was perhaps the best vantage point in pre-Columbian North America. As the art historian Sally A. Kitt Chappell recently noted, Cahokia also possesses a “cosmic landscape architecture” intended, perhaps, to mirror the larger universe.

Further reading: Sally A. Kitt Chappell, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Melvin Fowler, The Cahokia Atlas: A Historical Atlas of Cahokia Archaeology (Springfield: Illinois Historical Preservation Agency, 1989); Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1994); George R. Milner, The Cahokia Chiefdom: The Archaeology of a Mississippian Society (Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler, Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

—Martha K. Robinson