The North American Mound Builders

Artist’s Reconstruction of Cahokia

Compared to Chaco Canyon (see pages 357-358), Cahokia exhibited a more steeply graded social order. Moreover, in contrast to other mound-building societies—which gradually increased the size of their mounds—construction at Cahokia began with the massive pyramid and great plaza at its core. From the outset Cahokia’s rulers displayed an ability to mobilize community labor on a scale unparalleled anywhere else in North America. (Richard Schlecht, National Geographic Image Collection.)

Scholars generally believe that the mounds built by North American woodlands societies symbolized the fertility of the earth and its inhabitants. The idea was that the act of building mounds renewed the fertility of the earth and the welfare of the community. Mound construction strengthened social solidarity by bringing people together in activities intended to ensure the prosperity of all. Moreover, mound building was accompanied by feasting that celebrated communal solidarity. Yet as the woodlands

Societies grew more complex and stratified, moundbuilding began to serve other purposes. Paramount chiefs and elite families often appropriated the mounds’ symbolic power by reserving them as burial grounds for their exclusive use or by erecting temples on their summits to glorify their ancestors.

The Etowah (EE-toe-wah) River Valley in northwestern Georgia provides evidence of this process of social and political change. Here, as in many parts of the eastern

Architecture to Mesoamerican prototypes, there is no evidence of direct Mesoamerican influence at Cahokia or other Mississippian mound-building sites. Indeed, archaeologists have not found imported Mesoamerican manufactured goods anywhere in the eastern woodlands. Although Mesoamerican beliefs and rituals may have had some influence on them, Cahokia’s elite generated its own distinctive cosmology and ideology (see Seeing the Past: Symbols of Fertility in Cahokian Sculpture).

Cahokia’s Influence

Following the abrupt and dramatic consolidation of power at Cahokia in around 1050, its influence radiated outward throughout the Mississippi Valley. A number of other regional centers, perhaps rivals of Cahokia, emerged from the area of modern Oklahoma to the Atlan-

Woodlands, the adoption of maize agriculture led to greater social and political complexity. Etowah, which eventually boasted six mounds, became the region’s major political center. It first achieved local prominence in the eleventh century, but over the next five centuries its history showed a cyclical pattern of development and abandonment.

In the eleventh century Etowah was a small settlement with residences, community buildings, and perhaps a small mound and plaza. Ritual life was confined to feasting, and there was a notable absence of prestige goods that would signify a strong social hierarchy. The earliest confirmed evidence of mound building dates from the twelfth century, when several other mound settlements appear in the Etowah Valley. Although these settlements were probably the capitals of independent chiefdoms, archaeological evidence of social ranking at this time is slim. Apparently these settlements were still organized around principles of community solidarity rather than hierarchy and stratification.

In the first half of the thirteenth century, the entire Etowah Valley was abandoned, for unknown reasons. When settlement resumed after 1250, a social transformation occurred. Over the next century mound building expanded dramatically, and a sharply stratified chiefdom emerged that exercised overlordship over at least four neighboring mound settlements. Monuments were built at the site, including a large ceremonial hall and a raised central plaza. In a burial mound reserved exclusively for Etowah’s ruling elite, archaeologists have found prestige goods such as engraved shell ornaments, flint swords, embossed copper plates, and copper headdress ornaments. The wide dispersal of these items across the southeastern woodlands in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries indicates that there were strong networks of regional exchange.

In Etowah and elsewhere in the region, wooden fortifications and ceremonial art featuring motifs of violence and combat testify to increasing political conflict and warfare. Copper plates depicting winged warriors found in Etowah burial mounds were almost certainly imported from the Mis-sissippian heartland, if not from Cahokia itself.

The concentration of power that was evident in the Etowah chiefdom during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries proved to be unstable. After 1375 Etowah and other large chiefdoms in the southeastern woodlands collapsed. The inhabitants again abandoned the site of Etowah. Regional trade networks became constricted, and the flow of prestige goods diminished. Whether chiefly authority was weakened by enemy attack or internal strife is uncertain. By the time the Spanish explorers arrived in 1540, another trend toward concentration of political power and expansion of territorial control was well under way. At this point, however, the capacity to organize mound building and the possession of prestige goods were no longer sufficient to claim political authority. Warfare had supplanted religious symbolism as the source of a chief’s power.