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CAHOKIA
- This article is about the Native American city. For the modern city located about ten miles to the southeast, see Cahokia, Illinois.
Cahokia is the site of an ancient Native American city located near Collinsville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri in the American Bottom floodplain. The site is composed of a series of large, man-made earthen mounds. It is also known for its "woodhenges", or timber circles, a name derived from Stonehenge, as these structures marked solstices, equinoxes and other astronomical cycles.
World Heritage Site
Cahokia is the largest and one of the best-known Mississippian sites, and the term "Cahokian" is sometimes used to describe that ancient culture. Cahokia Mounds was designated a National Historic Landmark on July 19, 1964, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site was designated a World Heritage Site in 1982. The park protects 2200 acres (8.9 km²), and is the focus of ongoing archaeological research.
History
Cahokia was first settled around 650 AD during the Late Woodland period, but mound building did not begin there until about 1050 at the beginning of the Mississippian period. The site was abandoned between around 1250 and 1400. The inhabitants left no writen records, and the original name of the city is unknown. The name "Cahokia" refers to an unrelated clan of Illiniwek people living in the area when the first French explorers arrived in the 1600s. The Osage, Omaha, Ponca, Quapaw and others are believed to be the descendants of the Mississippians who built the city, but no stories about the Cahokia urban center were ever recorded among these tribes.
Monk's Mound
Monk's Mound is the largest earthen structure at Cahokia.
Monk's Mound is the central focus of this great ceremonial center. A massive structure with three terraces, it is the largest man-made earthen mound in North America. It stands about 100 feet (30.5 m) high with a base 790 feet wide and 1,037 feet long (241 by 316 m). At the top of the mound there was a large building -- perhaps a temple or the residence of the city's paramount chief -- that could be seen throughout the city. Excavations show that this building was about 48 feet wide and 105 feet long, and stood about 50 feet high.
Urban landscape
A 50-acre (200,000 m²) plaza spread out in front of Monk's Mound. The flat, open terrain was originally thought to reflect the fact that the city was built on the Mississippi's alluvial flood plain, but soil studies revealed that the landscape was originally undulating and had been expertly levelled by the city's inhabitants. That means that Cahokia can boast the largest man-made earthen plaza in the world to this day.
Beyond Monk's Mound and the plaza, perhaps as many as 120 more mounds stood at varying distances from the city center. To date, 109 mounds have been located, 68 of which are in the park area. The mounds are divided into several categories -- platform, conical, ridge-top, etc. -- each of which may have had a different function. In general terms, the city seems to have been laid out in a diamond-shaped pattern approximately a mile from end to end.
Ancient city
During its heyday in the pre-Columbian period Cahokia was the largest urban center in North America north of the great Mesoamerican cities in central Mexico. And it was the most important center for the peoples known today as Mississippians, whose culture ranged across what is now the Midwest, East, and Southeast United States.
Before about 1050 AD, Cahokia was home to only about a thousand people, but after that date its population grew explosively. Archaeologists estimate the city's population at between eight and forty thousand at its peak, with more people living in farming villages surrounding and supplying the main urban center. Cahokia maintained trade links with other settlements as far away as the Great Lakes to the north and the Gulf Coast to the south. Pottery and stone tools in the Cahokian style are common at the Silvernail archaeological site near Red Wing, Minnesota. Some scholars believe Cahokia was larger than any city in the United States until about 1800 when Philadelphia surpassed its estimated peak population.
Prestige burial
Archaeologists found the remains of a man who was almost certainly an important Cahokian ruler during excavation of Mound 72, a ridge-top burial mound. Probably in his 40's when he died, the man was buried on a bed of more than twenty thousand marine-shell disc beads laid out the shape of a falcon, with the bird's head appearing beneath his head and its wings and tail beneath his arms and legs. The falcon warrior, or "birdman," is a common motif in Mississippian culture, and this burial is believed to have powerful iconographic significance.
A cache of arrowheads in a variety of different styles and materials was found near the grave of this important man. Separated into four types, each from a different geographical region, the arrowheads demonstrated Cahokia's extensive trade links in North America. Over 250 other skeletons were also recovered from Mound 72. Many were found in mass graves; some were missing their hands and heads, which seems to indicate human sacrifice. The relationship of these other burials to the central burial is unclear, but it is unlikely that they were all deposited at the time of the ruler's burial. Wood in several parts of the mound has been radiocarbon-dated to 950–1000 AD.
Cahokia's decline
Cahokia was abandoned a century or more before Europeans arrived in North America. Environmental factors such as overhunting and deforestation have been proposed as explanations. Another suspected cause is invasion by nomadic peoples, but no evidence of warfare has been found except for a wooden stockade with a series of watchtowers built at the center of the city. Diseases facilitated by the large, dense urban population are another possible cause. But most recent theories propose political collapse as the primary reason for Cahokia's decline.
See also
External links
Further reading
- Emerson, Thomas (1997) "Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power," Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
- Emerson, Thomas and Barry Lewis (1991) "Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississipian Cultures of the Midwest," Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- Mink, Claudia Gellman (1992) "Cahokia, City of the Sun: Prehistoric Urban Center in the American Bottom," Collinsville, IL: Cahokia Mounds Museum Society.
- Pauketat, Timothy (1994) "The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America," Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
- Young, Biloine and Melvin Fowler (2000) "Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis," Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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