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Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World
About one thousand years ago, Native Americans built hundreds of earthen platform mounds, plazas, residential areas, and other types of monuments in the vicinity of present-day St. Louis. This sprawling complex, known to archaeologists as Cahokia, was the dominant cultural, ceremonial, and trade center north of Mexico for centuries. This stimulating collection of essays casts new light on the remarkable accomplishments of Cahokia.
360 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1997
49 people want to read
About the author
Timothy R. Pauketat
29 books15 followersTim Pauketat is an archaeologist and professor of Anthropology and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He previously taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo and the University of Oklahoma. Professor Pauketat is interested in the study of ancient religion and urbanism, and has been excavating the pre-Columbian colonies and pilgrimage sites of the Cahokian civilization around St. Louis north into Wisconsin. The author or editor of a dozen scholarly books, Tim also writes for nonprofessional audiences, recently including a book entitled Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin, 2010).
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November 19, 2015
"Building and rebuilding a monument, be it a post, post circle, plaza, mound, or mound-top structure, regularly employed much labor. Thus, the act of monument construction as a regular event was probably as important, if not more so, than the actual monument itself" (43).
Some have equated rise of Mississippian polities with maize, but "its achievement of paramount economic status comparable to that described during historic times may, in fact, coincide with the time of Cahokian decentralization or the aftermath or both" (55).
"maize may have been equally or less productive than some of the native crops, and maize is clearly less nutritious than several of the starchy and oily seeds. In this regard, the dominance of maize in late prehistoric and protohistoric economies appears to go hand-in-hand with increases in dental and infectious diseases, as well as increases in mortality, especially among weaned children (57).
In the American Bottom, there was an infield-outfield system with private family gardens near the structures, perhaps in areas now considered to be plazas, and large communal fields around the settlements (59).
61: maize, chenopod, erect knotweed, maygrass, little barley, marsh elder, sunflower, squash, gourd, tobacco, perhaps amaranth. Seeds of black nightshade, wild bean, panic grass may be been encouraged/protected, if not cultivated/produced. May have been arboriculture as well, especially persimmon and perhaps sumac. Cultivated in fields vs. gardens.
Emergence and peak of Cahokia focused around intensive cultivation of multi-crops of starchy seeds, whereas corn became mor eprevalent during/after Cahokian decline (66)
Suggests 10-20,000 as population maximum at Cahokia (unclear whether that includes E. St. Louis and St. Louis) (121).
Storage pit size and number larger, above-ground during Lohmann phase, indicating communal storage. exterior fire pits also common during Lohmann, indicating communal/group cooking. Large cooking, roasting, and steaming facilities appear to have been shared by households. Communal cooking facilities appear to have persisted into early Stirling, but are absent later. More numerous, smaller, and interior caches during STirling and Moorehead, indicating intense privatization.
Cairo lowlands may have been more complex and technologically advanced earlier, esp. in 9th century, and likely interacted strongly with Cahokia. Much of classic Cahokian technology occurred first in Cairo lowlands (shell-tempered pottery, red-filming of pottery, microliths, wall-trench houses, bow and arrow, town/dispersed hamlet settlement pattern) (258).
Cahokia may not have dominated eastern woodlands physically/militarily/economically (no long-range supply of buffalo meat from western Iowa, for example), but notions of how dominant ideology can create cultural hegemony explain how Cahokia could have influenced at great distance w/o control of land, state-level organizational hierarchies, or large tributary networks (260). Anderson believes Cahokian ideological components that were influential were "an agricultural fertility cult, views of the world order and cosmos that were reflected in iconography and mound-plaza layouts, and the sacred status of the chiefly elite" (263).
"Many of the solutions to the problem of complex political formation, that is, the emergence of complex chiefdoms ruled by hereditary elites with appreciable secular as well as sacred power and authority, were first worked out successfully in early Cahokia. These ideological solutions were likely widely copied . . . as the inevitable result of groups buying into the ideology of power that emanated from ... Cahokia" (263).
Ramey incised pots "distinctly shaped and decorated at Cahokia or other centers with the iconography of a Cahokian cosmos. The simple design fields of these pots contained motifs suggestive of order, symbolizing the four directions, four cosmological partitions, or the four winds. These pots, distributed out from Cahokia, were material symbols of the relationship between the Cahokian elite and the American Bottom commoner. Ramey-Incised pots are signatures of domination. They attest to the limited redistribution of medicines, comestibles, and ideology from centers out to rural folk, but it is unlikely that redistributions came close to matching the provisions previously appropriated by centers. Could not have been built on sharing.
Rural areas relied on centers for their social existence as well as religious and economics. Relatives would have lived in center & important "community events would have taken place in centers. Even relatively small kin-group functions might have been feasible only at Cahokia and the secondary centers" (271).
Mississippianism as "a culture of political organization, agricultural production, craft manufacturing, social relations, and other 'elite' knowledge negotiated and transformed locally and transmitted via long-distance lines of communication" (276).
Maize agriculture & complex societies south of Cahokia made it susceptible to influence, such that Cahokians themselves could not spread south (they could challenge intruders) but instead spread north to Wisconsin (268).
Suggests that early on, there was a distinction between Cahokian elite and the rest. Later local elites gained power, which paradoxically may have disenfranchised subgroups without power and led them to move away( 140).
Some have equated rise of Mississippian polities with maize, but "its achievement of paramount economic status comparable to that described during historic times may, in fact, coincide with the time of Cahokian decentralization or the aftermath or both" (55).
"maize may have been equally or less productive than some of the native crops, and maize is clearly less nutritious than several of the starchy and oily seeds. In this regard, the dominance of maize in late prehistoric and protohistoric economies appears to go hand-in-hand with increases in dental and infectious diseases, as well as increases in mortality, especially among weaned children (57).
In the American Bottom, there was an infield-outfield system with private family gardens near the structures, perhaps in areas now considered to be plazas, and large communal fields around the settlements (59).
61: maize, chenopod, erect knotweed, maygrass, little barley, marsh elder, sunflower, squash, gourd, tobacco, perhaps amaranth. Seeds of black nightshade, wild bean, panic grass may be been encouraged/protected, if not cultivated/produced. May have been arboriculture as well, especially persimmon and perhaps sumac. Cultivated in fields vs. gardens.
Emergence and peak of Cahokia focused around intensive cultivation of multi-crops of starchy seeds, whereas corn became mor eprevalent during/after Cahokian decline (66)
Suggests 10-20,000 as population maximum at Cahokia (unclear whether that includes E. St. Louis and St. Louis) (121).
Storage pit size and number larger, above-ground during Lohmann phase, indicating communal storage. exterior fire pits also common during Lohmann, indicating communal/group cooking. Large cooking, roasting, and steaming facilities appear to have been shared by households. Communal cooking facilities appear to have persisted into early Stirling, but are absent later. More numerous, smaller, and interior caches during STirling and Moorehead, indicating intense privatization.
Cairo lowlands may have been more complex and technologically advanced earlier, esp. in 9th century, and likely interacted strongly with Cahokia. Much of classic Cahokian technology occurred first in Cairo lowlands (shell-tempered pottery, red-filming of pottery, microliths, wall-trench houses, bow and arrow, town/dispersed hamlet settlement pattern) (258).
Cahokia may not have dominated eastern woodlands physically/militarily/economically (no long-range supply of buffalo meat from western Iowa, for example), but notions of how dominant ideology can create cultural hegemony explain how Cahokia could have influenced at great distance w/o control of land, state-level organizational hierarchies, or large tributary networks (260). Anderson believes Cahokian ideological components that were influential were "an agricultural fertility cult, views of the world order and cosmos that were reflected in iconography and mound-plaza layouts, and the sacred status of the chiefly elite" (263).
"Many of the solutions to the problem of complex political formation, that is, the emergence of complex chiefdoms ruled by hereditary elites with appreciable secular as well as sacred power and authority, were first worked out successfully in early Cahokia. These ideological solutions were likely widely copied . . . as the inevitable result of groups buying into the ideology of power that emanated from ... Cahokia" (263).
Ramey incised pots "distinctly shaped and decorated at Cahokia or other centers with the iconography of a Cahokian cosmos. The simple design fields of these pots contained motifs suggestive of order, symbolizing the four directions, four cosmological partitions, or the four winds. These pots, distributed out from Cahokia, were material symbols of the relationship between the Cahokian elite and the American Bottom commoner. Ramey-Incised pots are signatures of domination. They attest to the limited redistribution of medicines, comestibles, and ideology from centers out to rural folk, but it is unlikely that redistributions came close to matching the provisions previously appropriated by centers. Could not have been built on sharing.
Rural areas relied on centers for their social existence as well as religious and economics. Relatives would have lived in center & important "community events would have taken place in centers. Even relatively small kin-group functions might have been feasible only at Cahokia and the secondary centers" (271).
Mississippianism as "a culture of political organization, agricultural production, craft manufacturing, social relations, and other 'elite' knowledge negotiated and transformed locally and transmitted via long-distance lines of communication" (276).
Maize agriculture & complex societies south of Cahokia made it susceptible to influence, such that Cahokians themselves could not spread south (they could challenge intruders) but instead spread north to Wisconsin (268).
Suggests that early on, there was a distinction between Cahokian elite and the rest. Later local elites gained power, which paradoxically may have disenfranchised subgroups without power and led them to move away( 140).
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