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Cahokia's mound-building
culture flourished a millennium ago near modern-day St. Louis.
JByard/iStock via Getty Images Plus
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An expansive city flourished almost a thousand years ago in the
bottomlands of the Mississippi River across the water from where
St. Louis, Missouri stands today. It was one of the greatest pre-Columbian
cities constructed north of the Aztec city of Tenochititlan, at
present-day Mexico City.
The people who lived in this now largely forgotten city were part
of a monument-building, corn-farming culture. No one knows what
its inhabitants named this place, but today archaeologists call
the city Cahokia.
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Typical Cahokian projectiles
excavated at the Mill Cove Comples in Florida. Keith Ashley,
CC BY-ND
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Excavations show it was home to thousands of families. The city
held hundreds of earthen mounds that supported council houses, homes
for social elites, tombs for powerful leaders and reminders
of lunar alignments. In addition, archaeologists have discovered
a Woodhenge
at Cahokia a circular celestial observatory made of large
wooden posts.
Archaeologists call the pre-Columbian societies that lived in the
Mississippi River Valley region "Mississippian cultures." These
people stretched as far west as Oklahoma, north to Wisconsin, south
to Mississippi and Louisiana, and east to Florida and North Carolina.
Though broadly similar, it's unlikely these people thought of themselves
as a unified political body.
A complex question in American archaeology hinges on how these
cultures arose and the ways in which they shared ideas, goods and
people.
Did the Cahokians create Mississippian culture as they moved outward
from their homeland, bringing their artifacts and ideas with them?
Or did Cahokians spread across the Midwest and Southeast, meeting
new communities and sharing ideas along the way, eventually helping
form Mississippian culture through a kind of melting-pot process?
Recently, my colleagues Sarah
Baires, Melissa
Baltus and Elizabeth
Watts Malouchos and I have contributed to new
research
investigating what it meant to be a Cahokian and Mississippian.
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Archaeology students
excavate Cahokian and Mississippian sites to learn more about
the culture they left behind. Jayur Mehta, CC BY-ND
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Striking out from Cahokia
Like cities today, Cahokia was a diverse place inhabited by groups
of people with different histories, diverging values and varying
ideas. So when people left the city, they likely had a variety of
reasons.
Early in Cahokia's history, movements into and out of the city
may have been tied
to religious gatherings while later migrations out of the city
may have been related
to political change. While there is some evidence for conflict
and potential for drought
in the region, archaeologists have no conclusive evidence that those
were the ultimate causes for people leaving the city. After all,
some people continued
to live there.
Whatever their motives, as Cahokian citizens spread out from St.
Louis and migrated throughout the woodlands east of the Mississippi
River, they carried their culture with them. Sometimes these were
unique artifacts, like particular
ceramics typical of their region. But they also brought with
them specific cultural constructs, like their beliefs in the ordering
of the cosmos and relationships between the upper and lower
worlds.
Recreating parts of home
During the early days of Cahokia, around 1050, emissaries from
the city traveled north to sites in what is now Wisconsin, spurring
the local creation of platform mounds and sculpted landscapes similar
to those in the Cahokian heartland. These places were religious
shrines or outposts that likely inspired the construction of
more Cahokian style earthen mounds in the north.
At sites like these, Cahokian citizens embraced new places and
new environments, often developing unique relationships with the
communities into which they immigrated. We know this through archaeological
excavations that found Cahokian-style households, site layouts,
pottery and more integrated into these new communities.
It looks like they were remembering their homeland, adopting local
practices while keeping their own traditions alive. In modern settings,
this phenomenon is often called a diaspora an enclave of
immigrants living among local populations with their own practices
and beliefs that hearken back to where they came from.
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Top: 1894 hand-drawn
map of the Carson Mounds site. Bottom: 2018 plan view drawing
of excavated structures at the site. Top: Cyrus Thomas Bottom:
Benny Roberts and John Connaway, CC BY-ND
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For instance, at the Carson
site in north Mississippi, far downriver from the Cahokian homeland,
Cahokian migrants recreated familiar built environments. They constructed
long, rectangular and semi-subterrenean houses at Carson that
looked like home.
Decades of excavations in north Mississippi suggest that the Cahokians
likely observed other people and their above-ground
square houses as they migrated southward, but chose to build
in ways that evoked homeland much as how a Hindu temple in
Texas still maintains the spires,
domes and craftwork of India. It took another one or two hundred
years for the square house style to be built at Carson.
Blending lifestyles with those they met
In northeast Florida, Cahokians encountered local
communities of St. Johns people, mound builders of sites like
Grant, Shields and Mt. Royal. Archaeologists call the tools and
architecture of the two groups' shared history the Mill
Cove Complex.
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Cahokian emissaries carried
distinctive tools like this Burlington chert drill. Jayur
Mehta, CC BY-ND
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For instance, Cahokians may have sought unique local knowledge
about the emergence of the Sun and Moon from the ocean celestial
alignments were important for Cahokians, and this would have
been an unobserved phenomenon in the Mississippi River Valley. In
exchange, Cahokian emissaries brought with them a kind of rock known
as Burlington chert, a familiar resource for making their unique
tri-lobed projectile
points.
Excavations in the area revealed long-nosed god maskettes made
of copper; these artifacts are found at only 20 or so sites across
the Southeast
and Midwest, all of which have a Cahokian presence. These masks
may have been part of a hero narrative that was also depicted in
rock art
and narrated by Siouxan speaking groups whose traditional lands
encompassed much of the Upper Midwest.
Farther north, Cahokians created other new, hybridized styles with
local populations.
For example, during Cahokia's emergence around 1050, nearby villages
in the uplands of southern Illinois went through their own social
transformation; they adopted some aspects of early Cahokian culture
while retaining cultural and architectural features
of their own.
This can be seen in artifacts found at the Halliday site, located
in southern Illinois approximately 30 kilometers southeast of Cahokia;
excavations have found nonlocal pottery types from Indiana and northern
Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas, alongside pottery typical of
Cahokia. People at Halliday were also eating slightly different
foods than at other nearby sites, suggesting they maintained culinary
traditions of their remote homelands.
Archaeologists have also found evidence that these upland villages
eventually adopted a Cahokian building method that placed a prefabricated
wall directly into a trench. But it didn't happen immediately. They
stuck with placing single posts into the ground to create building
walls for houses from 1050 to 1350, emphasizing villagers' choice
to maintain some of their pre-Cahokian
traditional practices in the face of social change.
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Monks Mound at Cahokia
is one of the largest earthen mounds in North America. Denise
Panyik-Dale/Moment Open via Getty Images
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Similarities to today
In each place where Cahokians remade themselves, they contended
with local communities, as well as their individual memories of
their homeland.
Cahokian migrants made houses that mimicked those at home; they
built according to celestial alignments from home; and in diasporic
settings, they made iconographic designs honoring mythic heroes
from their homeland.
Because Cahokians never ceased making their homeland wherever they
spread albeit in unique ways in new environments we
believe it makes sense to think of Cahokian and Mississippian culture
not as one monolithic entity with just one perspective, but instead,
a multitude of voices that together signified something greater.
The broader anthropological implication of our Cahokian research
is the reminder it provides across the centuries that migration
and identity are an ongoing process by which individuals and communities
make and remake themselves, all while remembering their homeland
and adapting to a new one. This process describes the complexities
of living in the diaspora, and it is as relevant today as it was
a thousand years ago.
Jayur
Mehta
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Florida State University
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