If you’ve never heard of Cahokia, it was a large pre-Columbian city located across the Mississippi river from present day St. Louis, Missouri. In the eleventh century CE, it was larger than any city in Europe at that time. But it was abandoned sometime after 1250 CE, and by the time Europeans arrived, except for several huge earthen pyramids and other massive earthworks, there was almost no trace of it.
I’ve just finished reading CAHOKIA, by Timothy Pauketat. Mr. Pauketat, an archaeologist, provides the story of the modern archaeological studies of these ruins, and what he believes we have learned about this ancient city.
Even before the Lewis and Clark expedition about 1803, European explorers noticed these gigantic earthworks and found them extremely puzzling. The largest pyramid, a flat-topped rectangular pyramid now called Monk’s Mound, was over 100 feet high, had a volume of 25 million cubic feet, and covered 15 acres. It was immediately apparent that building these things would require the organized labor of thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands. But in the early nineteenth century, most tribes in Mid-North America were hunter-gatherers who were at least semi-nomadic, who rarely lived in groups of more than a few hundred, and who had little in the way of any hierarchical political structures. Most Americans of European descent assumed that this had always been the case, so many argued that these flat-topped earth pyramids must be natural land forms. Others, noting that even though badly eroded, one could see that they had originally been laid out in perfectly straight lines, and aligned with the four cardinal directions, conceded that they were made by man, but refused to believe that the Native American tribes could have done it. So they began speculating about some “lost civilization” that might have built them.
By the mid-nineteenth century, many earthworks had been dug up by amateur pot hunters, and human bones had been unearthed. By then, the pyramids were being leveled to make room for cities and roads and farms. The next explanation, one that persisted for a century, was that Indian Tribes (Native American Peoples) had indeed built them, but not as part of a city. The whole complex, they said, was merely a place where many tribes would meet for some annual festival, like an Indian version of Woodstock. Not until the 1950s did the archaeology of the site progress to the point that the foundations of thousands of single-family sized huts were unearthed. These huts, complete with hearths and storage pits, established that tens of thousands of families had lived there. When this information was published, most archaeologists were reluctant to believe it, since it totally contradicted everything that had been taught about Native American life before Columbus.
What appears to have happened at Cahokia, according to Pauketat is this: Most parts of the U.S. that are being farmed today, were being farmed by about 800 CE, though usually not very intensively. And the main crop was corn (maize), just as it is today. At about 800 CE, a small city was established on the Mississippi flood plain near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and was supported by adjacent farm fields also located on that flood plain. Then about 1054, the entire city was razed and a new city, four times as large, was built on top of the old Cahokia. The new town could hold at least 10,000 residents within its wooden walls. But counting the suburbs, the city was five times that big. And this population center was fed and supported by innumerable peasant farmers spread out fifty miles in every direction, with some farms that had a clear connection to Cahokia located well over one hundred miles away.
Along with the temples and houses were huge courtyards and playing fields. The largest was 900 feet by 1600 feet. Cahokians danced, played at sports, feasted, and also conducted ritual human sacrifices--regularly, and on a grand scale. In one burial vault, a high-status male was buried with 52 young females, aged 15-20 years. Often, sacrificial victims were killed by having their skulls bashed in with a blunt instrument, probably a stone mace. Analysis of the teeth showed that these young female victims were of a different ethnic group than the Cahokians. The captives were probably taken from one of the subject peoples who lived on their periphery.
Sometimes a ritual slaughter seemed to involve the deliberate extinction of an entire blood line. There, the victims were other Cahokians, and probably very high status Cahokians. Men, women, children, and even infants were decked out in ritual finery, and then bludgeoned to death.
Analysis of the bones of Cahokians shows that the residents of the city were well fed and healthy; but the same cannot be said about some of the peasant farmers in the surrounding countryside. Small farms were found not only in the flood plain, but on upland prairies over a hundred miles from the city. And objects found there show a direct connection with the city. Analysis of the bones buried there showed signs of the kind of extreme malnutrition which would occur when people are fed a diet of only corn (maize.) So while life was good in Cahokia (if you weren’t part of the sacrifice), life was miserable in the small farmsteads which provided Cahokia its food, and also wove its cloth. This means that Cahokia was not just a city, but an empire, or at least a city-state with imperial pretensions. If Cahokians could not project military power for a hundred miles in every direction, then it is unlikely they would have been able to confiscate food from farmers located that distance from the city, especially if these farmers were nearly starving themselves. And these small farming villages would not have voluntarily surrendered their daughters to be ritually slaughtered--unless they were being crushed under the heel of an unimaginably repressive empire.
When the facts about Cahokia became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, no one was really happy to hear them. Most Americans of European descent would prefer to think that the owners of the continent they had appropriated were simple, child-like folk—not the engineers of an empire. And most Native Americans were saddened to discover that their own ancestors had been capable of such unspeakable cruelty to their own people. So nothing that was learned was what anyone wanted to hear.
But Cahokia went as suddenly as it had come. Some time about in the late thirteenth century, the city was abandoned as was the surrounding farmland. And the entire region remained nearly devoid of humans for two centuries. The author does not speculate as to why this happened, but one reason would seem obvious. If you grow maize year after year, the soil, not matter how rich it was to start with, will eventually become depleted. There are areas in Oaxaca and Chiapas, where maize was originally domesticated, where the same plots have been farmed for 4,000 years and are still fertile. But they use a multi-culture. Maize, beans, squash, and chilies are grown at the same time in the same field. The beans fix nitrogen for the maize; the maize provides a pole for the beans to climb; and the squash leaves provide a ground cover to mulch out the weeds. And a diet of this combination of plants provides a nearly balanced diet. And if the food is consumed locally by those who produce it, and if all animal and human wastes are returned to the field, then no minerals leave the farm.
But if you grow only maize and send most of it to a far away city to be eaten by others, then the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium in this maize is making a “one way trip” away from the farm, and sooner or later there is so little left in the soil that nothing will grow. This is the most economical explanation of the death of Cahokia.
The author finds it interesting that none of the tribes of Native Americans today have any tales, songs, or folklore of any kind which seem to mention this city. He says that it seems that they made a conscious effort to forget it. But why wouldn’t they? For masses on the bottom of the system, the whole thing probably seemed like a bad dream and when it was over they wanted to forget it had ever happened. And for the elites—we don’t know how it all ended. But the elites may have fled for their lives. If so, they would have spent the rest of their lives denying that they had ever been Cahokians, lest they be torn limb from limb by former peasants. No one wept for Cahokia.
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