Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos

by Sally A. Kitt Chappell

At the turn of the last millennium, a powerful Native American civilization emerged and flourished in the American Midwest. By A.D. 1050 the population of its capital city, Cahokia, was larger than that of London. Without the use of the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, its technology was of the Stone Age, yet its culture fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture. The model for this urbane world was nothing less than the cosmos itself. The climax of their ritual center was a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acre rising a hundred feet into the sky—the tallest structure in the United States until 1867. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of this six-square-mile area in the central Mississippi Valley from the Big Bang to the present.

Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages?

To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present.
Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Indigenous

238 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2002

Reviews

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The components of the future earth and of Monks Mound were once bits of matter, created in the cauldrons of exploding stars, moving with great, swirling gravitational forces, like the stars still forming near the Cone Nebula today." pg xiv

Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos is a reference book about the historic site, Cahokia Mounds. Author Sally Chappell takes the reader from the Big Bang all way through to the present - an estimated 13 billion years.

To say it is an ambitious book is an understatement.

"A major change in midwestern climate about 1250 may have caused considerable stress in Cahokia. The overall temperature of the region cooled during this infamous Pacific Climate Episode." pg 72

That being said, once Chappell gets into the history of the site itself, it is an excellent look at a little-remembered place of forgotten significance.

Monks Mound is the largest earthen mound in North America, but so few people know about it.

The visitor's center is currently closed for a much-needed update. I've been in there half a dozen times and it doesn't do the site justice.

What Cahokia Mounds could really use is a team of historians, archaeologists, and a couple years worth of grants to properly study it.

And more books like Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos.

"By 1900 the Cahokia landscape was so changed by farming, canals, ditches, clear-cutting, railroad construction, housing, erosion, highways, streets, telephone lines, and rogue vegetation that only shadows of its past remained." pg 151

Recommended for scholars who are interested in Cahokia Mounds. Chappell gives you a broad but ultimately helpful place to start your research.

[Eugenio Negro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Besides the excellent chronology that includes the known beginning of time and the thorough archeology, the book effectively commits so many people's work to memory, saving the decision from oblivion to care about something bigger than oneself and see it through across generations: the builders of Cahokia are elegantly and subtly put up as a mirror image of the mostly anonymous people from the twentieth century who worked to keep Cahokia alive.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent historical and photographic overview of the Cahokia site through time.