Cahokia (Mississippian Culture Metropolis; Illinois)

[Sertile]

I was able to visit Cahokia Mounds over the weekend, which was the largest pre-colombian city in the US or Canada and includes one of the world's largest pyramids, as well as an enormous woodhenge and 70-something smaller mounds.

There is more than one woodhenge in this world, BTW. The Native Americans also built woodhenges. In fact, I was able to visit one nearby just a couple of weeks ago. It's in Cahokia, in southern Illinois, which is thought to be the "capitol" of the pre-Columbian Mound-Builder civilization.

The Cahokian woodhenge is simply monstrous, having 75 or 80 posts and being spread out over about a quarter of a mile. It's thought to have been a kind of calendar (but then, what henge isn't?). The Indians there were mostly farmers, and It's set up to highlight the solstices and equinox (equinoi?)

I believe there are also some stone circles and the like up north, but people like to call them "glacial erratics" and blame them on natural forces. Can't give the natives too much credit, after all.

 

[lopaka]

I'm positive I've mentioned this on some other thread, but if anyone is ever in the vicinity of St. Louis, Missouri, the Cahokia Mounds State Park, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, is definitely a must see for anyone with an interest in ancient cultures, astronomy, geomancy, etc. Other than the extreme misfortune of a highway slicing through the site, it is an astonishing place. The interpretive center is ambitious and wonderful.

IMHO, it deserves to be seen in the same light as other, far more famous World Heritage locales.

Check it out if you can.

 

[Sertile]

I've been to Cahokia myself, and I concur that it is quite impressive. In addition to Monk's Mound, which stands at about 100 ft tall, there are about 100-odd other mounds in the immediate area and there used to be even more in downtown STL until they were levelled to make way for progress. There's even a woodhenge nearby, and a pretty darn big one too. It's the biggest native construct outside of Central America and it really puts other midwest mound sites like Spiro and Aztalan to shame.

 

[KeyserXSoze]

The Lost City of Cahokia

http://www.neh.fed.us/news/humanities/2004-09/cahokia.html

Ancient Tribes of the Mississippi Brought to Life
By Emmett Berg

The city of Cahokia, in modern-day Illinois, had a population of twenty thousand at its pinnacle in the 1300s. With pyramids, mounds, and several large ceremonial areas, Cahokia was the hub of a way of life for millions of Native Americans before the society's decline and devastation by foreign diseases.

Representatives from eleven tribes are working alongside archaeologists and anthropologists to assist the Art Institute of Chicago in developing an exhibition that explores artistic and cultural themes of a major branch of pre-Columbian civilization--the direct ancestors of most American Indians today. "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South," opening November 20, comprises more than three hundred works. It's one of the largest showings of artifacts, design, and architecture dating from the rise and decline of Mississippian civilizations in the Midwest and the South between 2000 B.C.E and 1600 C.E.

"This particular exhibition has the potential to be the most important exhibition ever on Native American Indians. It could change the popular conception of what Native Americans were like," says Garrick Bailey, a Tulsa University professor of cultural anthropology who is part white, part Choctaw, and part Cherokee.

"One of the strongest images in American society, even today, is that of the American Indian," he says. "It seems to range only from red devil to noble savage--both a simple child of nature. It's very pervasive. It's had a tremendous impact on how white America sees Indians and increasingly how younger American Indians see themselves. Trying to address that issue is the most important one."

Tribal members will serve as docents for the exhibition. Mural-sized reconstruction drawings will evoke the panorama and complexity of ancient settlements found in present day Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, along the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers, and elsewhere in the South. The murals are meant to reinforce the shared themes and worldview of ancient America implicit in the artifacts, although there are regional distinctions and variation.

The objects on display include ceremonial pipes sculptured in animal and human forms, conch shells engraved with ritualistic scenes, copper repoussé plates of rulers in full regalia, masks of shell and wood, embellished ceramic vessels and figural forms, finely worked stone implements, mica figures, and jewelry. Many of the works come from private collections and have never before been viewed widely.

Hero, hawk, and open hand refer to three recurrent motifs in native mythology regarding life, death, and renewal. Pipe effigies and fertility figures depict heroes, or legendary figures--often ancestors or mythical sources of life--who were also supernatural protectors and models for human leaders. Figures such as the hawk were connected with forces in nature and were believed to be linked to humans; dreams and ritual offerings made by shamans, hunters, and rulers maintained the cycles of society. The open hand is a sign in the Native American constellation associated with the passage of the soul from the realm of the living to that of the dead. Such cosmological forces were invoked by rituals and by aligning ceremonial sites to the paths of the sun or moon and the movements of constellations.

The exhibition begins with a map of the eastern U.S. stripped of all detail except place names descended from Native American languages--a riposte to the American concept of "manifest destiny": the idea that America was a wilderness until Europeans arrived, and that native peoples were ill-equipped to forge a civilization of their own.

"Names of hundreds of places and geographical features, signs pointing to scattered archaeological sites, and many routes of overland travel testify to that fact that there never really was an untamed wilderness here--or at least not since the time of the mastodon and saber-tooth cat," writes Richard Townsend, the Institute's curator for Amerindian art, in his introduction to the exhibition catalog. "Many highways are also superimposed on roads traveled since early colonial times, which in turn followed centuries-old Indian trails . . . and the paths of seasonal animal migrations."

Retracing the steps of a culture from which so much has been washed away can be baffling. Bailey recounts a 1910 encounter between the Omaha anthropologist Francis La Flesche and the Osage priest Saucy Calf. For four days Saucy Calf performed ceremonial rites consisting of ninety songs, six long ritual prayers, and seven symbolic ritual acts called we'-ga-xe. Saucy Calf used a notched tally stick on which each notch represented a song--a finger holding his place as a memory aid. As La Flesche recorded Saucy Calf, he noticed that the priest would sometimes skip notches without singing a song, and asked why he did so.

"Saucy Calf replied that he should not concern himself about those songs, for the ones he had forgotten were of ’no particular importance,'" Bailey writes.

Though there are many skipped notches, the archaeological record is more complete: it begins with hunting and gathering peoples of the late Pleistocene epoch during the last phases of the Ice Age. They hunted mammoths and bison as well as deer, and collected fruits and plants in season. Their stone axe heads and other objects show a high level of symbolic activity, Townsend says. The largest known settlement, located on the banks of the river Bayou Maçon in northeastern Louisiana, was anchored by a fifty-foot-high ceremonial mound aligned to the sun's path.

Around 500 B.C.E. central Ohio became a beehive of new cultural activity. The Adena people built conical mounds to commemorate tribal leaders, and their practices were expanded by the Hopewell culture, which existed between the years 1 and 400 C.E. The Newark Earthworks is perhaps the best known. The site encompassed four square miles and included two giant circles, an ellipse, a square, and an octagon, all connected by parallel walls. Bradley T. Lepper writes in an essay included in the exhibition catalog, "Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, among the foremost of the early students of American archaeology, declared in 1848 that the works occupying this Ôremarkable plain' were so complicated that it was Ôimpossible to give anything like a comprehensive description of them'."

The Hopewell people had by this time expanded their artistic repertoire to specialized, supernatural figures such as the long-nosed god, the birdman, and the old-woman-who-never-dies. They employed exotic materials such as shell from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from present-day Michigan, mica from what is now North Carolina, and obsidian from the land that became Wyoming. Artisans painstakingly crafted walls and mounds from layers of clay of different colors, and topped them with sod. As development encroached upon the works, an increasing amount of artifacts were laid bare.

"The earthworks were not just symbols on the landscape, they were built to be part of the landscape; and, perhaps, to allow their builders to transcend the boundaries of the terrestrial sphere," Lepper writes. "In one section, called Observatory Mound, the intricate 18.6-year cycle of the moon can be encompassed by four points on the eastern horizon marking a maximum northern moonrise, a minimum northern moonrise, a maximum and minimum southern moonrise, and four points on the western horizon marking the corresponding moonsets."

The Hopewell people eventually spread westward to the Illinois River Valley and into Tennessee, where the Mississippian period began some time after 800 C.E. Cahokia was built near where the Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois rivers empty into the Mississippi.

As the region's capital, Cahokia was replete with flat-top pyramids, burial mounds, and a vast ceremonial concourse surrounded by commercial and residential areas as well as outlying agriculture zones. A central mound would grow to a height of one hundred feet--the largest mound north of the valley of Mexico. The city housed artisans, political embassies, and was a destination for religious pilgrims. Cahokians were ruled under matrilineal succession and practiced human sacrifice. The death of a leader required the sacrifice of the spouse and at times other family members.

The city's enduring legacy came in the form of highly trained artisans who supplied works to chieftains and elites. Cahokian elites most likely used figurines crafted into pipes, shells inscribed with supernatural characters, stylized copper plates, and other items as a means to disseminate their beliefs to outlying communities, including the ancient chieftaincies at Etowah, Georgia; Spiro, Oklahoma; and Moundville, Alabama. The body of art produced at Cahokia spread far and wide, helping to perpetuate and reinforce the central myths and rituals common to the people at the time.

"The objects in the exhibition belong to the symbolic domain but had utility originally," Townsend says. One such item is a bannerstone, which functioned as a tool for atlatl spear throwers but could take on symbolic value similar to a coat of arms. When intricate figures or designs were carved on bannerstones, perhaps identifying them as props in one of the great myths, they would assume the power of relics. "The objects become very special as part of trappings of secular and religious power." Increased food production led societies as large as Cahokia to thrive for more than two centuries, but according to Townsend, a drought may have set in motion the slow decline that eventually resulted in the abandonment of nearly every large town.

By the time Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto and six hundred Spanish soldiers landed near Tampa Bay in 1539, the world they found was a well-populated system of sociopolitical centers and dependent villages, such as the four-hundred-mile stretch of Tennessee and Alabama that once formed the extended environs of the city known as Coosa. Bailey recalls one of De Soto's chroniclers reporting, "When the expedition reached the banks of the river separating them from town of Cutifachiqui, the woman chief ’. . . came from the town in a carrying chair in which certain principal Indians carried her to the river.'

"At Talomeco [in present day South Carolina] they found a town of five hundred houses, abandoned, its fields choked with weeds," Bailey says. "They were told that a few years earlier the town had been struck by a pestilence, which had killed many of the people, and caused the survivors to flee. Some iron tools found at the deserted town by De Soto men showed that the people had already come in contact with Europeans. Most likely they had met the Spanish settlers at San Miguel de Guadalupe, a coastal settlement founded in 1526 and abandoned the following year."

Contacts that Europeans made with Native Americans in this era set off a wave of catastrophic outbreaks of measles, smallpox, diphtheria, and even the common cold. More than 90 percent of Indian populations perished within a century.

The Indian country most colonists found when they crossed the Appalachians lacked the sophistication of the Cahokia and the mound builders. The natives had cruder tools, and no explanation for the mounds, leading some of the Europeans to believe that another race entirely had been responsible for fantastic artifacts and earth works.

"It would be like if you visited Europe in the Middle Ages, and there were no royalty or nobles--only peasants," Bailey says.

What remains of Cahokia are not only artifacts. Its root language, Dhegiha, has a legacy west of the Mississippi with the Omaha, Ponca, Osage, and Kansa, and perhaps the Chiwere-Winnebago of the Great Lakes region.

Yet a legacy does not ensure survival. Tim Thompson, a medicine man fluent in the Muscogee language, said in an interview for the exhibition that the younger generation has an interest in languages, but as just one of many activities that form the time-honored passing on of sacred knowledge.

"When you're trying to teach a language, regardless of what kind, but especially a Native Indian language, it's hard to hold anybody's interest," Thompson says, "because this kind of language was never a written language to begin with. The language is part of culture, and culture, to me, is something you can't teach-- you've got to live it."

"What's crucial to re.member is that people themselves do survive," Bailey says. "The tribes that the early Anglo Americans found when they came over the Appalachians are the direct descendants of those who built the mounds. They are the same people, and they will go on."

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Indian Mounds Mystify Excavators

By Michelle Delio

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/roadtrip/riverroad/0,2704,65170,00.html

02:00 AM Oct. 22, 2004 PT

COLLINSVILLE, Illinois -- A thousand years ago along the banks of the Mississippi River, in what is currently southeast Illinois, there was a city that now mystifies both archeologists and anthropologists.

At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world. About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000 residing in its surrounding "suburbs" and outlying farmlands. It was the region's capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and science.

But by 1300, the city had become a ghost town, its carefully built structures abandoned and its population dispersed.

Archeologists continue to comb what is now the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, looking for clues that will tell them what happened here -- why the city and its culture vanished and why the people who lived here built more than a hundred earthen mounds, many of which are still scattered across the countryside.

Cahokia is not the historical name of this city; the current name comes from the native people who were living in the area when French explorers arrived in the early 1600s. The city's authentic name -- the name given to it by its creators -- is lost to time, as its residents did not appear to have a written language.

But what really puzzles archeologists and anthropologists is that there are no legends, no records, no mention whatsoever of the once-grand city in the lore of any of the tribes -- Osage, Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw -- that are believed to be the direct descendents of the city's builders.

This odd silence on the matter of Cahokia has led some experts to theorize that something particularly nasty happened there. Possibilities include an ugly struggle for power following a leader's death, a government gone berserk, droughts, a period of very cold weather that killed the crops, disease.... All have been put forth as reasons for Cahokia's demise.

Whatever happened, it was bad enough that people just wanted to forget Cahokia, according to Tim Pauketat, an associate professor of archeology at the University of Illinois, who is excavating at Cahokia.

Despite its hard-luck reputation, the Cahokia site feels immensely peaceful today. There's no whiff of angst from an unsettled spirit world, no sense that anything awful happened here.

The 2,200-acre site contains the central portion of what had been roughly a 4,000-acre city. Scattered across the site are about 68 human-made mounds of various sizes, some no more than a gentle rise on the land, others reaching 100 feet toward the sky.

Originally, there might have been more than 120 mounds, but the locations of only 109 have been recorded. Many were altered or destroyed over the last three centuries by farming and construction projects.

The Cahokians made three different types of mounds -- pyramid-shaped (with flat tops upon which important officials' houses and ceremonial lodges were built), ridge-topped and conical. The latter two were used for burials of wealthy citizens and sacrificial victims.

Monks Mound, Cahokia's biggest mound, is a pyramid mound that rises 100 feet from its 14-acre base. Visitors can reach the top by climbing the 141 stairs that pass through the mound's three tiers. Archeologists have found that a large building -- 105 feet long, 48 feet wide and about 50 feet high -- was once positioned on top of the mound. It's believed to have been the home of Cahokia's rulers.

Radiocarbon sampling of the earth that makes up the mound, as well as tools and other artifacts discovered within it, indicates it took 250 years to build Monks Mound, from around A.D. 900 to 1150. The mound was constructed by hauling 22 million cubic feet of dirt from pits located a mile or so away. The dirt was piled into baskets and dragged to the site by workers.

Cahokia also contains five "woodhenges," circles of erect posts that served as celestial calendars, marking the seasonal solstices and equinoxes.

Cahokia is exceptional for its size and complex city structure, but it is not unique. Seventeen centuries ago, the Midwest was covered with hundreds of such precisely aligned astronomical markers and mounds.

These structures survived for close to two millennia before most were plowed over in the 19th century, paved over in the 20th century or destroyed by archaeologists digging to recover artifacts such as pipes, pottery and other religious relics.

A team from the University of Cincinnati's Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites, has been virtually piecing together the fragments of the immense existing earthworks built by three other prehistoric Native American cultures -- the Adena, Hopewell and Fort Ancient peoples -- in the area that now comprises Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. The people who built Cahokia were of the Mississippian culture.

Using archaeological data gleaned from remote-sensing devices that can detect remains below the ground, and infrared aerial photographs and satellite images to figure out where the earthworks had been located and what they looked like, the University of Cincinnati team is virtually rebuilding the mounds, using standard architectural rendering software. The result will be interactive programs that show how the river valleys of the Midwest would have looked when the mounds were new.

At Cahokia, most of the mounds still exist, though some were destroyed before the site was protected. Two mounds that provided a clear view of a drive-in movie theater's screen several miles away were removed in the 1960s to stop people from watching films for free.

Anthropologists said it's critical to preserve the mounds, which contain many clues about Cahokian culture. While no longer in danger of being leveled for commercial purposes, the mounds are fragile and subject to environmental degradation. State budget cuts have made it difficult to ensure that rain doesn't wash away the remnants of what is the only known prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico.

A recent excavation of a small ridge-top mound -- Mound 72 -- exposed the bodies of nearly 300 people, mostly young women believed to be sacrificial victims, who'd been buried in mass graves. Nearby is the burial site of a man believed to have been a ruler, about 45 years of age, whose body lies on a blanket of more than 20,000 shell beads, surrounded by piles of arrow tips from tribes that inhabited the present-day states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin. They were presumably given as a tribute to the deceased.

Archeologists believe other bodies buried near the ruler are the remains of those who were sacrificed to serve him in the next life. But the skeletons of four men with their heads and hands missing were also found near the largest sacrificial pit, and no one is quite sure why these bodies were mutilated before being buried.

Certainly, a headless, handless body wouldn't make for a good servant.

Every new discovery here raises more questions than it answers about Cahokia, said Bill Iseminger, assistant site manager at Cahokia Mounds.

"I believe that new archeological technology will absolutely allow us to solve many of the mysteries of Cahokia," Iseminger said. "But right now, what with the budget cuts, we're focused mostly on keeping the site intact, just trying to survive so that we can make more people aware of the complexity and brilliance of Native American culture."

http://www.wired.com/news/roadtrip/riverroad/0,2704,65170,00.html

 

[TheQuixote]

I found a programme dealing with Monks Mound, Cahokia on Radio 4's Listen Again facility, I've yet to listen to it but here's a link and brief info on it:

The Moundbuilders of Cahokia
Tuesday 28 December 2004 11.00-11.30am

For most of us, American history starts in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Yet before that time, some monumental structures were being built all across the East Coast, up to the Mississippi River, which are little talked about. Aubrey Manning visits Cahokia in Illinois, the site of the biggest earthen structure in North America to find out, who built it and why, and what happened to the societies living there before the Europeans.

 

[Anonymous]

Thought i'd put my 2 cents in. There are several structures within the cahokia empire that are extremely similar in design to Stonehenge and are usually called woodhenge's. One was uncovered a while back when they were clearing land for Smithville Lake (a large resevoir about 25 miles from home). Instead of preserving this archeological landmark they went ahead and flooded it and built a model of it nearby out of the water's path. So, I would like to ask the people that protest there being any contact between the past civilizations, How do these structures look so similar?

 

[Pete Younger]

Are ther any pics that you can post chrisford?

 

[lopaka]

Are ther any pics that you can post chrisford?

Pete: try http://angam.ang.univie.ac.at/LiveMiss/ ... DHENGE.htm
or http://ecuip.lib.uchicago.edu/diglib/so ... e_lg_2.jpg

To be honest, I think this is an example of 'convergence' (is that what I mean? ie Because a bird in Hawai'i has a beak & diet like a parrot doesn't mean it's closely related to the group of birds known as parrots.)

Here's another link, however, including Cahokia stuff towards the bottom of the page, that explores some of the more *speculative* theories regarding the Southeastern mound-builders, their culture and origins.

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/ ... ounds.html

EDIT/D'OH: last link corrected, thanks to Pete's observation.

 

[Pete Younger]

Thanks for that Lopa, most interesting, however your third link is a repeat of the second.

 

[ramonmercado]

'Black drink': Scientists find evidence of ritual use of caffeinated brew at Cahokia
August 6th, 2012 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Residents of Cahokia, a massive pre-Columbian settlement near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, consumed "Black Drink" from special pottery vessels like this one. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

People living 700 to 900 years ago in Cahokia, a massive settlement near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, ritually used a caffeinated brew made from the leaves of a holly tree that grew hundreds of miles away, researchers report.

The discovery – made by analyzing plant residues in pottery beakers from Cahokia and its surroundings – is the earliest known use of this "black drink" in North America. It pushes back the date by at least 500 years, and adds to the evidence that a broad cultural and trade network thrived in the Midwest and southeastern U.S. as early as A.D. 1050.

The new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight the cultural importance of Greater Cahokia, a city with as many as 50,000 residents in its heyday, the largest prehistoric North American settlement north of Mexico.

"This finding brings to us a whole wide spectrum of religious and symbolic behavior at Cahokia that we could only speculate about in the past," said Thomas Emerson, the director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey and a collaborator on the study with researchers at the University of Illinois, the University of New Mexico, Millsaps College in Mississippi and Hershey Technical Center in Pennsylvania. The Archaeological Survey is part of the Prairie Research Institute at the U. of I.

University of New Mexico anthropology professor Patricia Crown and Hershey Technical Center chemist Jeffrey Hurst conducted the chemical analyses of plant residues on the Cahokian beakers, a project inspired in part by a similar analysis they led that found that people living in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in A.D. 1100-1125 consumed liquid chocolate in special ceramic vessels found there.

Despite decades of research, archaeologists are at a loss to explain the sudden emergence of Greater Cahokia (which included settlements in present-day St. Louis, East St. Louis and the surrounding five counties) at about A.D. 1100 – and its rapid decline some 200 years later. A collection of ceremonial mounds, some of them immense, quickly rose from the floodplain more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Mississippi. The Cahokian mound builders spawned other short-lived settlements as far away as Wisconsin, Emerson said.

Greater Cahokia appears to have been a crossroads of people and cultural influences. The presence of the black drink there – made from a plant that grows hundreds of miles away, primarily on the Gulf coast – is evidence of a substantial trade network with the southeast.

"I would argue that it was the first pan-Indian city in North America, because there are both widespread contacts and emigrants," Emerson said. "The evidence from artifacts indicates that people from a broad region (what is now the Midwest and southeast U.S.) were in contact with Cahokia. This is a level of population density, a level of political organization that has not been seen before in North America."

How this early experiment in urban living held together for as long as it did has remained a mystery.

The pre-Columbian settlement at Cahokia was the largest city in North America north of Mexico, with as many as 50,000 people living there at its peak. Credit: Painting by Lloyd K. Townsend. Image courtesy of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois.

"People have said, well, how would you integrate this?" Emerson said. "One of the obvious ways is through religion."

Europeans were the first to record the use of what they called "the black drink" by Native American men in the southeast. This drink, a dark tea made from the roasted leaves of the Yaupon holly (ilex vomitoria) contains caffeine.

Different groups used the black drink for different purposes, but for many it was a key component of a purification ritual before battle or other important events. Its high caffeine content – as much as six times that of strong coffee, by some estimates – induced sweating. Rapid consumption of large quantities of the hot drink allowed men to vomit, an important part of the purification ritual.

At the same time the black drink was in use at Cahokia, a series of sophisticated figurines representing agricultural fertility, the underworld and life-renewal were carved from local pipestone. Most of these figures were associated with temple sites.

"We postulate that this new pattern of agricultural religious symbolism is tied to the rise of Cahokia – and now we have black drink to wash it down with," Emerson said.

The beakers, too, appear to be a Cahokia invention. They look like single-serving, cylindrical pots with a handle on one side and a tiny lip on the other. Many are carved with symbols representing water and the underworld and are reminiscent of the whelk shells used in black drink ceremonies (recorded hundreds of years later) in the southeast, where the Yaupon holly grows.

The researchers chose to look for evidence of black drink in the beakers because the pots were distinctive and fairly rare, Emerson said. The team found key biochemical markers of the drink – theobromine, caffeine and ursolic acid – in the right proportions to each other in each of the eight beakers they tested. The beakers date from A.D. 1050 to 1250 and were collected at ritual sites in and around Cahokia.

Cahokia was ultimately a failed experiment. The carving of figurines and the mound building there came to an abrupt end, and the population dwindled to zero. But its influence carried on. Cahokian influences in art, religion and architecture are seen as far away as Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Wisconsin, Emerson said.

More information: "Ritual Black Drink Consumption at Cahokia," PNAS, 2012.

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"'Black drink': Scientists find evidence of ritual use of caffeinated brew at Cahokia." August 6th, 2012.
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-black-scie ... nated.html

 

[rynner2]

TV Tonight, 2000 Ch5:

A team of experts uses cutting-edge technology to examine the history of a Native American people who built a thriving metropolis in what is now Illinois, tracing the rise and fall of a civilisation that came into existence in 900AD, but vanished 400 years later. Much of the site is covered by forest, but archaeologist John Kelly obtains a view of what lies beneath and exposes the true scale of the city, while Bill Iseminger hunts down the engineering secrets behind the 10-storey pyramid that stood at its centre.

http://www.radiotimes.com/episode/dy6hgh/americas-hidden-pyramid-city-ancient-mysteries

 

[Yithian]

Finding North America’s lost medieval city
Cahokia was bigger than Paris—then it was completely abandoned. I went there to find out why.
ANNALEE NEWITZ - 12/13/2016, 9:30 PM
A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region's tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.

At the city's apex in 1050, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in what became the United States, bigger than London or Paris at the time. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose along the eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading across the river to St. Louis. One particularly magnificent structure, known today as Monk’s Mound, marked the center of downtown. It towered 30 meters over an enormous central plaza and had three dramatic ascending levels, each covered in ceremonial buildings. Standing on the highest level, a person speaking loudly could be heard all the way across the Grand Plaza below. Flanking Monk’s Mound to the west was a circle of tall wooden poles, dubbed Woodhenge, that marked the solstices.

Despite its greatness, the city’s name has been lost to time. Its culture is known simply as Mississippian. When Europeans explored Illinois in the 17th century, the city had been abandoned for hundreds of years. At that time, the region was inhabited by the Cahokia, a tribe from the Illinois Confederation. Europeans decided to name the ancient city after them, despite the fact that the Cahokia themselves claimed no connection to it.

Centuries later, Cahokia's meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery. It was booming in 1050, and by 1400 its population had disappeared, leaving behind a landscape completely geoengineered by human hands. Looking for clues about its history, archaeologists dig through the thick, wet, stubborn clay that Cahokians once used to construct their mounds. Buried beneath just a few feet of earth are millennia-old building foundations, trash pits, the cryptic remains of public rituals, and in some places, even, graves.

To find out what happened to Cahokia, I joined an archaeological dig there in July. It was led by two archaeologists who specialize in Cahokian history, Sarah Baires of Eastern Connecticut State University and Melissa Baltus of University of Toledo. They were assisted by Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Watts of Indiana University, Bloomington, and a class of tireless undergraduates with the Institute for Field Research. Together, they spent the summer opening three large trenches in what they thought would be a sleepy little residential neighborhood southwest of Monk's Mound.

They were wrong. The more they dug, the more obvious it became that this was no ordinary place. The structures they excavated were full of ritual objects charred by sacred fires. We found the remains of feasts and a rare earthen structure lined with yellow soils. Baires, Baltus, and their team had accidentally stumbled on an archaeological treasure trove linked to the city's demise. The story of this place would take us back to the final decades of a great city whose social structure was undergoing a radical transformation.

Continued at length with numerous images:
https://arstechnica.com/features/20...r-old-lost-city-beneath-the-st-louis-suburbs/

 

[EnolaGaia]

A new study refutes the somewhat legendary claim that Cahokia was mysteriously abandoned centuries before the arrival of European explorers. Archaeological evidence indicates the decline of the Mississippian culture and its exodus from Cahokia didn't end the site's importance in subsequent Native Americans' affairs.

New study debunks myth of Cahokia's Native American lost civilization

... A University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist has dug up ancient human feces, among other demographic clues, to challenge the narrative around the legendary demise of Cahokia, North America's most iconic pre-Columbian metropolis.

In its heyday in the 1100s, Cahokia -- located in what is now southern Illinois -- was the center for Mississippian culture and home to tens of thousands of Native Americans who farmed, fished, traded and built giant ritual mounds.

By the 1400s, Cahokia had been abandoned due to floods, droughts, resource scarcity and other drivers of depopulation. But contrary to romanticized notions of Cahokia's lost civilization, the exodus was short-lived, according to a new UC Berkeley study.

The study takes on the "myth of the vanishing Indian" that favors decline and disappearance over Native American resilience and persistence, said lead author A.J. White, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology.

"One would think the Cahokia region was a ghost town at the time of European contact, based on the archeological record," White said. "But we were able to piece together a Native American presence in the area that endured for centuries."

The findings, just published in the journal American Antiquity, make the case that a fresh wave of Native Americans repopulated the region in the 1500s and kept a steady presence there through the 1700s, when migrations, warfare, disease and environmental change led to a reduction in the local population. ...

Their evidence paints a picture of communities built around maize farming, bison hunting and possibly even controlled burning in the grasslands, which is consistent with the practices of a network of tribes known as the Illinois Confederation.

Unlike the Mississippians who were firmly rooted in the Cahokia metropolis, the Illinois Confederation tribe members roamed further afield, tending small farms and gardens, hunting game and breaking off into smaller groups when resources became scarce.

The linchpin holding together the evidence of their presence in the region were "fecal stanols" derived from human waste preserved deep in the sediment under Horseshoe Lake, Cahokia's main catchment area. ...

Fecal stanol data were also gauged in White's first study of Cahokia's Mississippian Period demographic changes, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. It found that climate change in the form of back-to-back floods and droughts played a key role in the exodus of Cahokia's Mississippian inhabitants.

But while many studies have focused on the reasons for Cahokia's decline, few have looked at the region following the exodus of Mississippians, whose culture is estimated to have spread through the Midwestern, Southeastern and Eastern United States from 700 A.D. to the 1500s.

White's latest study sought to fill those gaps in the Cahokia area's history. ...

Overall, the results suggest that the Mississippian decline did not mark the end of a Native American presence in the Cahokia region, but rather reveal a complex series of migrations, warfare and ecological changes in the 1500s and 1600s, before Europeans arrived on the scene, White said. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/in-flight-diagnosis-facial-barotrauma.html

PUBLISHED REPORT:
A.J. White, Samuel E. Munoz, Sissel Schroeder, Lora R. Stevens. After Cahokia: Indigenous Repopulation and Depopulation of the Horseshoe Lake Watershed AD 1400–1900. American Antiquity, 2020; 1.
DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2019.103

 

[EnolaGaia]

Newly published research indicates Cahokia's expansion into a metropolis was ignited by corn agriculture, which arrived in the Mississippi Valley much later than previously believed. The evidence for corn production correlates with the timeframe in which the settlement began a period of dramatic growth.

Cahokia's rise parallels onset of corn agriculture

Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still a subject of debate. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city's rapid expansion.

The findings are published in the journal American Antiquity.

The research team determined the age of charred corn kernels found in homes, shrines and other archaeological contexts in and around Cahokia. The researchers also looked at carbon isotopes in the teeth and bones of 108 humans and 15 dogs buried in the vicinity.

Carbon-isotope ratios differ among food sources, with isotope ratios of corn being significantly higher than those of almost all other native plant species in the region. By analyzing the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 in teeth and bones, the team determined the relative proportion of different types of foods the people of Cahokia ate in different time periods.

The corn remnants and isotope analyses revealed that corn consumption began in Cahokia between 900 and 1000. This was just before the city grew into a major metropolis.

"There's been an idea that corn came to the central Mississippi River valley at about the time of Christ, and the evolution of maize in this part of the world was really, really slow," said retired state archaeologist Thomas Emerson, who led the study. "But this Cahokia data is saying that no, actually, corn arrived here very late. And in fact, corn may be the foundation of the city." ...

Beginning in about 1050, Cahokia grew from "a little village of a few hundred people to part of a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant," Emerson said. The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000. This early experiment in urban living was short-lived, however. By 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city's population had dispersed. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200514131737.htm

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic particulars and abstract for the Cahokia / corn research cited above.

American Antiquity
Volume 85, Issue 2 April 2020 , pp. 241-262
Isotopic Confirmation of the Timing and Intensity of Maize Consumption in Greater Cahokia
Thomas E. Emerson, Kristin M. Hedman, Mary L. Simon, Mathew A. Fort ...
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2020.7

Abstract
The history of maize (Zea mays L.) in the eastern Woodlands remains an important study topic. As currently understood, these histories appear to vary regionally and include scenarios positing an early introduction and an increase in use over hundreds of, if not a thousand, years. In this article, we address the history of maize in the American Bottom region of Illinois and its importance in the development of regional Mississippian societies, specifically in the Cahokian polity located in the central Mississippi River valley. We present new lines of evidence that confirm subsistence-level maize use at Cahokia was introduced rather abruptly at about AD 900 and increased rapidly over the following centuries. Directly dated archaeobotanical maize remains, human and dog skeletal carbon isotope values, and a revised interpretation of the archaeological record support this interpretation. Our results suggest that population increases and the nucleation associated with Cahokia were facilitated by the newly introduced practices of maize cultivation and consumption. Maize should be recognized as having had a key role in providing subsistence security that—combined with social, political, and religious changes—fueled the emergence of Cahokia in AD 1050.

SOURCE: https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...ater-cahokia/18D70835505B14A03E28D7FAB039B665

 

[EnolaGaia]

In 2021 researchers announced that there was no compelling stratigraphic and geological evidence for the hypothesis that Cahokia collapsed due to wood overuse / deforestation and subsequent flooding.

Study: Scant evidence that ‘wood overuse’ at Cahokia caused local flooding, subsequent collapse

Whatever ultimately caused inhabitants to abandon Cahokia, it was not because they cut down too many trees, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Archaeologists from Arts & Sciences excavated around earthen mounds and analyzed sediment cores to test a persistent theory about the collapse of Cahokia, the pre-Columbian Native American city in southwestern Illinois that was once home to more than 15,000 people. ...

No one knows for sure why people left Cahokia, though many environmental and social explanations have been proposed. One oft-repeated theory is tied to resource exploitation: specifically, that Native Americans from densely populated Cahokia deforested the area, an environmental misstep that could have resulted in erosion and localized flooding.

But such musings about self-inflicted disaster are outdated — and they’re not supported by physical evidence of flooding issues, Washington University scientists said. ...

FULL STORY: https://source.wustl.edu/2021/04/st...ia-caused-local-flooding-subsequent-collapse/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the 2021 published report on the deforestation / flooding hypothesis.

---

Evaluating narratives of ecocide with the stratigraphic record at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois, USA
Caitlin G. Rankin, Casey R. Barrier, Timothy J. Horsley
Geoarchaeology, Volume36, Issue3, May/June 2021, Pages 369-387.
First published: 12 February 2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.21848

Abstract
Narratives of ecocide, when a society fails due to self-inflicted ecologic disaster, have been broadly applied to many major archaeological sites based on the expected environmental consequences of known land-use practices of people in the past. Ecocide narratives often become accepted in a discourse, despite a lack of direct evidence that the hypothesized environmental consequences of land-use practices occurred. Cahokia Mounds, located in a floodplain of the central Mississippi River Valley, is one such major archaeological site where untested narratives of ecocide have persisted. The wood-overuse hypothesis suggests that tree clearance in the uplands surrounding Cahokia led to erosion, causing increasingly frequent and unpredictable floods of the local creek drainages in the floodplain where Cahokia Mounds was constructed. Recent archaeological excavations conducted around a Mississippian Period (AD 1050–1400) of earthen mound in the Cahokia Creek floodplain shows that the Ab horizon on which the mound was constructed remained stable until industrial development. The presence of a stable ground surface (Ab horizon) from Mississippian occupation to the mid-1800s does not support the expectations of the wood-overuse hypothesis. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that pre-Colombian ecological change does not inherently cause geomorphic change, and narratives of ecocide related to geomorphic change need to be validated with the stratigraphic record.

SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gea.21848