Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:18 Page Number: 437 Title Name: Yoffee 21 City of earth and wood: New Cahokia and its material-historical implications timothy r. pauketat, susan m. alt and jeffery d. kruchten Imagine a continent with a vast open interior covered in prairie grasses and great temperate forests drained by an extensive river system. Imagine further that this continent had been peopled for 15 millennia, first by foragers and, later, by horticulturalists living along the interior rivers. They grew a host of starchy and oily seed crops, cucurbits, and, after 800 ce, maize, supplementing their diet with wild game. Finally, imagine that, one day, year, or decade near the beginning of the fifteenth millennium on that continent, one group of people designed and built a city – just one. You have, of course, just imagined Cahokia, which was built midway through the eleventh century ce in the middle of North America only to be depopulated during the fourteenth century ce and, for all intents and purposes, forgotten by the time Europeans arrived (Map 21.1). Because of its seemingly historical isolation and its relationships to peoples and places that went before and came after, Cahokia may provide unique insights into the larger causal relationships between a city, its hinterlands, and its descendants. Much of what we know about this place revolves around the circumstances of its founding, which involve a convergence of diverse peoples, the formalization of religious practices, and a transformation of the rural landscape. In this chapter, we examine these foundational circumstances in order to seek general answers to questions of cities (or at least this one city): What did this city do? What were its economic and social attributes? How did religious activity shape it and its hinterland relationships? Why was it abandoned? Our answers to such questions, we believe, point us toward a greater appreciation of the material and spatial dimensions of cities that were defined by and, in turn, defined movements of people and other things experienced. At Cahokia, in the beginning, the particular materiality of the place lent theatricality to everyday experience while, in the end, it ensured that the whole could be partitioned and forgotten. This chapter examines 437 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:18 Page Number: 438 Title Name: Yoffee La ke pauketat, alt, and kruchten se sh oe N northern marker mound? or Mississippi flood plain H high-density occupation areas Cahokia St. Louis pi Riv er East St. Louis Miss issip Illinois Uplands 0 2 Kilometers Map 21.1 Location of Greater Cahokia and other Mississippian towns mentioned. the disposition of such features and the materiality of the process. But before examining the circumstances of its foundation, asking questions that follow from that foundation, and generalizations about materiality, we need to understand what Cahokia was. What was Cahokia? By 1100 ce, just fifty years into its existence as a city, Cahokia and the related complexes at East St. Louis and St. Louis sprawled irregularly across nearly 20 square kilometers of the Mississippi River floodplain and adjacent Missouri river bluffs, forming a “capital zone” (Map 21.2).1 Site plans and excavations attest to key organizational differences between the big-three complexes, hinting that each was a distinct administrative or ritualresidential district. Within that whole, there were at least 191 earthen 1 Compare B. L. Stark, “Formal Architectural Complexes in South-Central Veracruz, Mexico: A Capital Zone?”, Journal of Field Archaeology 26 (1999), 197–226; and Michael E. Smith, “The Archaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29 (2010), 137–54. 438 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:18 Page Number: 439 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia Map 21.2 Greater Cahokia’s capital zone. 439 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:19 Page Number: 440 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten pyramids: 120 in Cahokia, 45 in East St. Louis, and 26 in St. Louis. There were also several major plazas and a series of apparent neighborhoods strung out archipelago-like between ancient oxbow lakes and the Mississippi River itself. Based on counts of excavated houses and estimates of household size and building duration (calibrated by known numbers of rebuilds per fifty-year phase), estimates of maximum population sizes for the Cahokia and East St. Louis complexes range from 10,000 to 16,000 and 2,000 to 3,000, respectively.2 St. Louis could have been comparable in size to East St. Louis. Combined, and taking into account several more small towns and a greater Cahokia region populated by farmers, 25,000 to 50,000 people may have routinely engaged or identified with the city during its early twelfth century peak. Up to the mid-twelfth century, Cahokia (and East St. Louis and, presumably, St. Louis) existed without one or more city walls. Rather, the cityscape was open, constructed using a close-to-cardinal orthogonal grid that provided the baselines for at least eleven major mound-and-plaza sub-groups or sub-communities, not counting East St. Louis and St. Louis. This Cahokian grid – an orthogonal configuration offset 5 degrees east of north – remained throughout the site’s history once it was built into the cityscape at 1050 ce. Most of the mounds in the Cahokia and St. Louis districts were flat-topped packed-earth pyramids with rectangular outlines that were, in turn, aligned to the Cahokian grid. Another sixteen or so had rectangular shapes but “ridge-top” summits, denoting the location of a mortuary mound.3 A few dozen more had circular perimeters, some or all with flat summits. The Cahokia grid’s north–south axis is visible today, beginning at the principal pyramid (Monks Mound) and continuing south of the primary or “Grand” plaza as a kilometer-long earthen causeway extending to a large ridge-top mound. A possible principal east–west axis was described in early historic accounts as an avenue that extended from city center eastward some 4 kilometers to a modified bluff platform, from there continuing to the 2 3 Jeffrey D. Kruchten and Joseph M. Galloy, “Exploration of the Early Cahokian Residential Zone at East St. Louis,” paper presented at the Midwest Archaeological Conference, Bloomington, Indiana (2010); and Timothy R. Pauketat and Neal H. Lopinot, “Cahokian Population Dynamics,” in Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson (eds.), Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 103–23. Melvin L. Fowler, The Cahokia Atlas: A Historical Atlas of Cahokia Archaeology (Urbana: Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, University of Illinois, 1997). 440 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:19 Page Number: 441 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia L-shaped building d c ex d te va ca ex un te a av domiciles un council house council house sweatlodges domiciles domiciles post T-shaped building sweatlodge d te va ca ex un N 20 0 1 2 3 4 Meters Meters Figure 21.1 Plan views of Cahokian architecture at the East St. Louis (left) and Grossmann (right) sites, c. 1100 CE (East St. Louis image used with the permission of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). outlying “Emerald” mound complex 20 more kilometers away. City boundaries may have been marked as well (shown by dashed lines in Map 21.2). Cahokia’s axial plan was likely adjusted at the sub-community or neighborhood level. Excavations in or near five of these mound-and-plaza subgroups revealed neighborhoods distinguished by subtle differences in the kinds and densities of craft production debris. Possibly, the histories, ritual duties, and kin or ethnic identities of people at Cahokia varied by neighborhood. But Cahokia’s high-density residential neighborhoods, covering about 2.5 of the principal complex’s 13 square kilometers, appear to have been standardized to a degree. Rectangular buildings, some with T- and L-shaped alcoves, and circular lodges or rotundas were built around small subcommunity plazas and segregated from other domestic buildings. These patterns indicate a distinctly Cahokian architectural module repeated in specific locations into the countryside (Figure 21.1).4 4 Susan M. Alt, “Cultural Pluralism and Complexity: Analyzing a Cahokian Ritual Outpost,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, 2006; and Thomas E. Emerson, Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). 441 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:19 Page Number: 442 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten All arrangements changed some over the course of 300 years, which evident when examining the alignments of pole-and-thatch buildings. Some buildings marked major astronomical happenings through their orientations, possibly indicating that certain residential sectors (or affiliated priestly surveyors) commemorated key celestial events, or the people associated with those events.5 During the twelfth century, some of the largest public halls or great temples at Cahokia – covering up to 500 square meters with roofs supported by several large interior posts – were aligned to true cardinal directions. At the same time, the principal East St. Louis grid was different, offset c. 10 degrees west of north. So too were the long axes of at least five ridge-top mounds in Cahokia and East St. Louis (along with special pole-and-thatch buildings), which were aligned to extreme rising or setting positions of the mppn over its long 18.6-year cycl. Circumstances of foundation The pre-Mississippian “Terminal Late Woodland period” (roughly pre- 1000 ce) occupation of what would become this sprawling capital zone was restricted to a small village at East St. Louis and a large one at Cahokia, home to a thousand or more residents (Table 21.1). Based on excavations in the old deposits beneath Cahokia and other villages in the region, it seems likely that public spaces within the pre-Mississippian village(s), here dubbed Old Cahokia, were yet geared toward small corporate-group aggregations. Non-local people from up to 300 kilometers away are identifiable at Old Cahokia through their locally made pottery wares. Presumably these were potters who married into prominent local families, but they might also have been entire families who relocated to Old Cahokia to enjoy its peaceful living conditions.6 Besides the facts of immigration and tranquility at Old Cahokia, there are two more circumstances surrounding Cahokia’s “big bang” at c. 1050 worth mentioning. First, the decades on either side of 1050 were warmer and wetter than usual, ideal for growing bumper crops.7 Second, the early–mid 5 6 7 Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (London: Routledge, 2012). Susan M. Alt, “Complexity in Action(s): Retelling the Cahokia Story,” in Susan S. Alt (ed.), Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Precolumbian North America (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010), pp. 119–37. Larry Benson, Timothy R. Pauketat, and Edward Cook, “Cahokia’s Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change,” American Antiquity 74 (2009), 467–83. 442 Era Time period Civic-ceremonial centers mentioned in text Major development 1350 ce 1250 ce 1050 ce Mississippian Late Mississippian southeast Missouri towns Angel, Kincaid New Cahokia Cahokia depopulated Cahokia palisade built 950 ce pre-Mississippian Terminal Late Woodland Old Cahokia Cahokia’s “big bang” immigration into Cahokia region Late Woodland none Middle Woodland (aka Hopewell) Hopewell (Ohio) Pinson (Tennessee) Great Hopewell enclosures in Ohio 850 ce 750 ce 650 ce 550 ce 450 ce 350 ce 250 ce 150 ce 50 ce 50 bce 150 bce Early Mississippian Title Name: Yoffee 443 Year ce/bce Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:20 Page Number: 443 Table 21.1 Chronology chart of the Pre-Columbian American Midwest Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:20 Page Number: 444 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten pyramids plaza and pyramids pyramid pyramid pyramid pyramid id m ra py pyramid Monks Mound pyramid Grand Plaza pyramid pyramid pyramid Figure 21.2 Downtown Cahokia showing principal pyramids and plaza (outlined by dashed line). eleventh century was a period of great celestial activity: prominent comets, meteor showers, and supernovae made appearances. The Supernova of 1054 in particular might have incited politico-religious gatherings, constructions, or other sorts of commemorative activity. Whatever the combination of circumstances, Old Cahokia underwent a dramatic, fast-paced reconstruction at c. 1050. Around that date, a new public precinct – “Downtown Cahokia” – was constructed, comprised of a central 20-hectare Grand Plaza, large perimeter pyramids surmounted by pole-and-thatch architecture, and associated residential neighborhoods (Figure 21.2). Recent conservative estimates of the person-days involved in leveling and raising a third of that plaza exceed 10,000.8 Off to one side, extensive sealed deposits beneath Mound 51 attest to great late eleventh-century politico-religious festivals. Here is a rich sequence of great autumnal feasts involving hundreds to thousands of butchered white-tailed deer, thousands of pots full of cooked pumpkin soups 8 Susan M. Alt, Jeffrey D. Kruchten, and Timothy R. Pauketat, “The Construction and Use of Cahokia’s Grand Plaza,” Journal of Field Archaeology 35 (2010), 131–46. 444 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:21 Page Number: 445 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia and seed porridges, the smoking of much tobacco, the debarking of great cypress posts, and the making, using, and discarding of sumptuary goods and ritual objects.9 The spatial extent of the Cahokia site expanded considerably as the population quickly reached 10,000 or more people. What did this city do? The result we dub “New Cahokia,” and nothing like it had existed before 1050 north of Mexico. Indeed, nothing like it would exist again until the expansion of New York and Philadelphia after 1785. But Cahokia was heir to a millennia-old tradition of lightly populated ceremonial centers. Some of these were quite large. For instance, the central grounds of the great Archaic era site of Poverty Point covered more than 100 hectares at 1500 bce, occupied by perhaps several hundred people at one point. Later in time, the great enclosure at the 2,000-year-old Hopewell site covered 49 hectares. The contemporary Middle Woodland complex at Pinson, Tennessee (c. 100 bce– 400 ce), covered 160 hectares, but had few long-term inhabitants. Other great embanked enclosures of the Middle Woodland Hopewell peoples in Ohio covered 8–20 hectares and were sometimes clustered together.10 All such places – and there were many hundreds down through the millennia in eastern North America – may have been emplaced religious movements: short-term reinventions of age-old religious practices centered on prophets or happenings. Cahokia was heir to this legacy, and one might reasonably look to religion to understand the circumstances of its beginnings. But Cahokia was also unlike these earlier places. It was the first center with a dense population that sprawled across a tripartite civic-ceremonial complex. It was the first with an integrated orthogonal plan and possible neighborhood or modular standardization, its baselines consisting of rows of quadrilateral packed-earth pyramids and avenues, plazas, and marker posts. And Cahokia was probably the first center to have its design extended into a hinterland. It is in its hinterland that the history of New Cahokia may be more fully exposed. Much of the surrounding countryside was sparsely occupied before 9 10 Timothy R. Pauketat, Lucretia S. Kelly, Gayle J. Fritz, Neal H. Lopinot, Scott Elias, and Eve Hargrave, “The Residues of Feasting and Public Ritual at Early Cahokia,” American Antiquity 67 (2002), 257–79. Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin G. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Contributions to Knowledge, 1848), Vol. I. 445 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:21 Page Number: 446 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten and after its 1050–1200 ce heyday, leaving patterns of development closer to the surface. Of these, there are four to be highlighted: (1) traditional floodplain-village farmlands 20 kilometers to the north and south of New Cahokia were reorganized; (2) upland forests and prairie-edge savannah lands east (and presumably west) of New Cahokia were brought under cultivation by relocated if not immigrant farmers; (3) at least two distinctive religious complexes, and a number of other minor towns or ceremonial centers, were constructed within a 50-kilometer radius of the city; and (4) Cahokian religious practices were emplaced across the region via architecture (within nodal farmsteads or villages) and the associated performance and production of religion and religious things, respectively, especially through theatrical mortuary rites. This kind of ruralization in the Cahokia region suggests to us an intensified economy of cosmic performance, procession, and pilgrimage. The first two patterns have been discussed at length elsewhere. Suffice it to note here that the 1050 ce founding moment is readily identifiable near Cahokia as abandonments of pre-Mississippian hamlets and villages, usually replaced by single-family farmsteads.11 In the uplands to the east, a host of villages, farmsteads, and special religious sites were built, some in locales that had been nearly devoid of inhabitants before 1050. Immigrants were among the relocated settlers as were higher-status Cahokians and their ritual architecture.12 Presumably, Cahokian priests were on site and instrumental in the construction of many such places. Included among these, and the third hinterland pattern, are a series of suspected lunar temple complexes 20 to 25 kilometers east of the city. Two of three major complexes were founded at or slightly before 1050. The characteristics of all three contrast markedly with a “ritual-administrative” outpost just 8–12 kilometers to their southwest.13 This outpost, the Grossmann site, highlights the fourth pattern, seen throughout the countryside and back at New Cahokia. The architecture of Cahokian religion or politico-religious administrators – oversized homes, medicine lodges, council buildings, ancestral temples, a charnel building, storage houses, a possible mortuary scaffold, and marker posts – crowded the hilltop site. Its readily identifiable T- and L-shaped buildings and the circular sweatlodges are known elsewhere in the uplands, but all 12 11 Emerson, Cahokia. Susan M. Alt, “Identities, Traditions, and Diversity in Cahokia’s Uplands,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 27 (2002), 217–36. 13 Susan M. Alt, “Cultural Pluralism and Complexity.” 446 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:21 Page Number: 447 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia such buildings were constructed in the greater Cahokia region only from 1050–1200 ce. At this site and elsewhere, such building complexes were associated with deposits of ritual objects derived from discrete events, perhaps like the festivals of Cahokia. As at Cahokia, craft debris at the hinterland sites is non-randomly distributed in concentrated deposits, as if production occurred as part of periodic religious gatherings. Given their exceptional organizational characteristics, proximity, and suggestive indications of periodic processions, occupations, or craft production events, it is unlikely that any of these outlier complexes were simply towns or secondary centers that duplicated the administrative functions of the others (as in pre-state political-economic models). Rather, like the Cahokian capital zone itself, the outlier settlement districts betray organizational complementarities. As already described, such an ordered diversity – not present before 1050 ce and gone after 1200 – characterized the entire region. Such a regional order might be attributed in large part to the great annual festivals that brought many thousands of worshippers into the Grand Plaza. But the most significant religious rite may not have been an annual affair but rather one scheduled every few years. It consisted of theatrical mortuary performances where multiple young adults, mostly women, were sacrificed. Such rites entailed the use of bodies, living and dead, and material props in the retelling of cosmic legends, likely including the stories of a female fertility deity. Importantly, in the only well-documented case (Mound 72), the sacrificial women were either born of immigrant families or were foreign captives.14 Moreover, the mortuary sites and the subsequent ridgetop mounds were apparently public and open, the subject of repeated commemorations possibly attended by many from the region (Figure 21.3). Thus, while the city of New Cahokia (like most later Mississippian towns) may be said to be a “diagram” of fundamental cosmic relationships,15 that diagram was not a static template but a series of performed or lived relationships. And such relationships extended out into a hinterland. Indeed, we may conceive of the Cahokian landscape in relational terms such that human movement through it constructed the metaphors 14 15 Susan M. Alt, “Unwilling Immigrants: Culture, Change, and the ‘Other’ in Mississippian Societies,” in Catherine M. Cameron (ed.), Invisible Citizens: Slavery in Ancient PreState Societies (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), pp. 205–22; and Melvin L. Fowler, Jerome Rose, Barbara van der Leest, and Steven R. Ahler, The Mound 72 Area: Dedicated and Sacred Space in Early Cahokia (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1999). Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1991). 447 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:22 Page Number: 448 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten Figure 21.3 Select mortuary features in Mound 72: Left, pit containing twenty-two females buried atop former upright post. Right, four headless and handless males adjacent to pit containing fifty-three females (from Melvin L. Fowler et al. 1999, The Mound 72 Area: Dedicated and Sacred Space in Early Cahokia [Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1999] used with permission of the Illinois State Museum). of social life. In other words, it was by design the axis mundi of a complex cosmic order. No doubt, performances and movements were intended to lend an organic quality to the whole. (See Part I of this volume, “Cities as arenas of performance”). Likewise, performances of the regional order doubtless had an economic dimension. But New Cahokia was fundamentally about proffering the cosmos to its citizens, immigrants, and visitors. The cosmos in turn articulated identities, beliefs, and history and, to some extent, transformed people into a greater community. Why was it abandoned? The construction of a palisade wall shortly after 1150 ce was probably the harbinger of significant cultural change. More than likely, it was not designed strictly to protect economic resources. But its construction does indicate that, by 1200, Cahokian relationships proper were significantly reconfigured and downsized. In the following decades, the population of Cahokia proper would fall to between 1,000 to 3,500 people. At that time, the focus of Cahokian ceremonial life was the site’s East Plaza. As important as its diminution was the region-wide disappearance of New Cahokia’s ritual architecture. After 1200 ce, the distinctive medicine lodges, circular sweatlodges, square council houses, and the oversized public 448 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:22 Page Number: 449 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia buildings that characterized twelfth-century New Cahokia were not rebuilt. Among the last of these was a burned at an outlying rural “node” or shrine with a calibrated radiocarbon intercept of 1168 ce.16 Instead of these buildings, only larger-than-average rectangular buildings were built for use as corporate meeting halls or temples. The largest such public or religious buildings – which date to the decades just after 1200 – cover no more than 90 square meters. Such pervasive architectural changes might well have been related to an event at the East St. Louis site. Up to the 1160s, based on calibrated radiocarbon assays, East St. Louis seems to have been home to elite families living in overbuilt residential areas, including one walled compound, in association with council houses, medicine lodges, great open meeting halls or residences, storage buildings, oversized marker posts, and rotundas. However, some time around the 1160s, much of East St. Louis appears to have been burned down, likely an intentional if not ritually staged act. After that conflagration in the late twelfth century, large portions of the site were emptied. To the best of our knowledge, only two mounds and no offmound buildings were constructed afterwards.17 There was occupational continuity during this critical phase at Cahokia and in the countryside, but a regional transformation of some sort had taken place, and its effects were felt at all levels of social life. For instance, mundane culinary and technological practices were simplified at about the same time and seemingly over a span of a few decades or less. By the end of it, c. 1275 ce, Cahokia had dwindled to a minor Mississippian capital town, albeit one that might have loomed large in its descendants’ memories. The demise of Cahokia proceeded rapidly thereafter. By 1350, Cahokia was completely abandoned and, at European contact, forgotten. Proximate and ultimate reasons for the decline of Cahokia are difficult to sort out, but a loss of faith, a failure of leadership, destructive wars, factional competition, drought, and long-term climatic shifts remain in the mix. If the answers to why Cahokia and its region were abandoned are, at present, unanswerable, understanding how it was abandoned may be within our reach. To wit, the region-wide conflagration event at East St. Louis 16 17 Douglas K. Jackson and Philip G. Millhouse, The Vaughn Branch and Old Edwardsville Road Sites (Champaign-Urbana: Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, 2003). Timothy R. Pauketat, The Archaeology of the East St. Louis Mound Center (Urbana: Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, University of Illinois, 2005–2007), Part 1; and Andrew C. Fortier, The Archaeology of the East St. Louis Mound Center, Part 2. 449 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:22 Page Number: 450 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten suggests something more than an inexorable slide into oblivion. There may have been a planned break-up of the tripartite capital zone, perhaps along the sub-community fault lines that existed throughout the region’s history. Such a break-up might have entailed social or political segments emigrating at different moments out of the region, a possibility consistent with both regional demographic trends and the migration stories of possible offshoot populations. Intriguingly, after 1200, more than a dozen new Mississippian towns were founded to the south of the greater Cahokia region, and we might look to them for answers. These later towns, in southeast Missouri and western Kentucky, might have been founded by Cahokian émigrés. Each was home to hundreds of people between c. 1,200 and 1,400, and all possessed a common set of attributes: large pyramidal mounds fronted town plazas surrounded in turn by smaller platforms, orthogonally arranged houses, and a circumferential palisade wall. It is plausible that some of these downriver town attributes were based on Cahokian practices. This is because orthogonally oriented rectangular buildings are not common to all Mississippian towns in the South. Moreover, the sizes of Mississippian towns across the South varied considerably. Large post-1100 contemporaries of Cahokia along the Ohio River – Angel and Kincaid – each cover more than 40 hectares and have two major plazas and impressive palisade walls. The largest capital towns in the Lower Mississippi Valley also have two plazas and circumferential walls enclosing impressive earthen pyramids, a double plaza complex, and residences. By comparison, the Missouri and western Kentucky towns cover from about 7 to 20 hectares, close to the same size as an average Cahokian mound-and-plaza sub-community. Southeast Missouri towns also betray greater Cahokia’s astronomical obsessions and, possibly at Common Field and Lilbourn, the celestial angles, with some obvious adjustments for landscape features or bodies of water, are evident at Adams, Turk, and Towosaghy, all possibly built using a common plan. Importantly, Cahokia-style circular sweatlodges are known from excavations at Lilbourn and Crosno to postdate the last in the greater Cahokia region. These may hint that the sodalities or priesthoods responsible for these ritual buildings had moved from Cahokia to southeast Missouri and western Kentucky. Then again, free-standing marker posts, like those in Cahokia’s capital zone or the outlying towns of greater Cahokia are not known from modest excavations in southeast Missouri or western Kentucky, whether singly, in rows, or in Woodhenge circles. Likewise, there were no ridge-top mounds 450 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:22 Page Number: 451 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia or sacrificial ceremonies outside of greater Cahokia, with the possible exception of Mound C at the more distant Shiloh site (which also featured a carved Cahokian smoking pipe). Finally, Cahokia-style medicine lodges are not yet identified at any of the southern centers, although the houses of Mississippian leaders in the historic era Lower Mississippi Valley reportedly featured interior alcoves similar to Cahokia’s medicine lodges. Unfortunately, the excavated samples from the candidate downriver towns are inadequate for reaching any definitive conclusions about their relationships to the abandoned city of Cahokia. Suffice it to say that the later Missouri and western Kentucky towns are comparable in ways suggestive of historical linkages and at the same time a selective forgetting of key Cahokian ritual architecture and practices. Presumably, the commemoration of some Cahokian practices or ritual organizations among descendant communities could have been a function of either an intentional rejection of aspects of their Cahokian heritage or unintentional losses owing to the exigencies of emplacing traditional practices in new lands. Why was it forgotten? The demise of Cahokia was perhaps contingent in significant respects on the materiality of memory work. By this we mean to say that the production, enactment, performance, or erasure of social memories, which are at the root of all human cultures, political institutions, identities, city plans, etc., have a material dimension. But that materiality might vary in its experiential qualities, being more or less visible, audible, tangible, or durable, among other things. These differences may have been critical to the legacies of cities and towns in both ancient and contemporary times. Given the earthen and wooden materials used in most Cahokian constructions, the great architecture, administrative buildings, and religious spaces of this precocious indigenous city were probably destined for obsolescence. Even if people attempted to transfer or re-place it elsewhere, as possibly in the downriver towns, it is unclear how they might have done so generation after generation. Presumably, pilgrims who might have made the trek back to the ancient city increasingly based their own memories of the place on stories of others and, thus, would have lacked the ability to reimagine and recommemorate the depopulated city, especially after 1200. Too much of it had moldered to dust, its pyramids eroding into mounds grown over with grass and saplings. Absent that ability, descendants were unavoidably and increasingly alienated from their own legacy. 451 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:23 Page Number: 452 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten Of course, it is also possible that this alienation and forgetting may have been part of a willful rejection of this particular indigenous experiment with urbanization. That experiment appears to have involved some extreme ritual practices, such as human sacrifice, that were hosted, planned, and carried out by someone with authority far in excess of that which existed in the pre-Mississippian era. Presumably, such authority was vested in a series of persons, ruling councils, or priestly elites and derived from the cosmic powers embodied by Cahokia, its monuments and outlier complexes, and its people. If that administration (whether comprised of political elites, influential families, or powerful priests) was ever perceived to have violated some sacred trust or to have lost their supernatural sanctions, pilgrims might have ceased coming to Cahokia. Farmers might have left the region. The entire experiment in indigenous urbanism could have been rejected, with descendants seeking to forget Cahokia. Just such a willful rejection seems apparent in Cahokia’s Puebloan contemporary, Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. Although not as populous as Cahokia, the Chacoan phenomenon (850–1150 ce) appears as a series of great politico-religious movements that transformed the Southwest. A network of monumental, masonry “Great Houses” were the focus of Chacoan public ceremony and were destinations for pilgrims from across the Southwest.18 Intriguingly, oral traditions remain among contemporary Puebloan people that seem to tell of their rejection of the concentration of power in the hands of a few Chacoan leaders.19 But Chacoan Great Houses were not completely forgotten, and there is evidence of later Puebloan shrines and visitors to the ruins of Chaco Canyon.20 Given Chaco’s durable materiality of stone, such visitors have been able to remember never to repeat Chaco. 18 19 20 Stephen H. Lekson, The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon: An Eleventh-Century Pueblo Regional Center (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2006); Barbara J. Mills, “Remembering While Forgetting: Depositional Practices and Social Memory at Chaco,” in Barbara J. Mills and William H. Walker (eds.), Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material Practices (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008), pp. 81–108; and Ruth M. van Dyke, The Chaco Experience: Landscape and Ideology at the Center Place (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007). Stephen H. Lekson, “The Abandonment of Chaco Canyon, the Mesa Verde Migrations, and the Reorganization of the Pueblo World,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 14 (1995), 184–202. William D. Lipe, “The Mesa Verde Region during Chaco Times,” in David G. Noble (ed.), The Mesa Verde World: Explorations in Ancestral Puebloan Archaeology (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2006), pp. 29–37. 452 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:23 Page Number: 453 Title Name: Yoffee City of earth and wood: New Cahokia Conclusion Similar sustained memory work was more difficult at Cahokia just decades after its depopulation. Yet, in its time, New Cahokia appears to have had profound cultural effects on eastern North America. Knowing what we do now, it would be difficult to imagine, for instance, the same historic configuration of Indian nations and tribes in the Midwest, Midsouth, and eastern Plains had Cahokia never coalesced. Similarly, various pan-tribal religious societies and widespread ceremonial practices were probably contingent on the rise and fall of Cahokia. Not everyone agrees. Seemingly contradictory arguments have been made about New Cahokia by archaeologists seeking to explain its impacts on the Pre-Columbian history of eastern North America. On the one hand, some contend that Cahokia was simply a later and larger-than-normal expression of a millennia-old, pan-eastern pattern of large centers undergirded by mythic cultural continuities. On the other hand, in its foundations others see an historical disjuncture of sorts, involving the construction of something new in the form of Cahokia based on shadows of the past. Some of the shadows might even extend to Mesoamerica. Advocates of the various points of view might agree that, regardless of the degree to which one sees continuity or change, New Cahokia was about the performance of religion. Intellectual disagreements reside in the historical implications attached to that religion. If Mississippian religion is understood as a relatively static belief system, then Cahokia may have little to tell us about that which similar cities did around the world. However, if we understand Cahokian religion as a dynamic component of urbanization, reinvented or reimagined during performances that ultimately altered the political, social, and economic lives of people in distant lands, then the extensive and immediate sub-continental effects of New Cahokia may argue for the need to more closely examine religion as the basis of governance and the reason for the rise and fall of cities. Certainly, New Cahokia’s foundational redesign, the organized diversity of its capital zone, its standardized yet shifting neighborhood alignments, and its mortuary theatrics are similar to other early cities around the world. Ultimately, Cahokia’s history was contingent on the expansion of maize production by resettled and reorganized locals and immigrant families. But the legacy of Cahokia, or lack thereof, may be rooted in the materiality of its construction. Cahokia’s earthen and wooden construction materials defined 453 Comp. by: Vpugazhenthi Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 21 Date:7/10/14 Time:12:43:24 Page Number: 454 Title Name: Yoffee pauketat, alt, and kruchten the field of memory work and constrained the futures of its descendants, which might have been quite different had only the Cahokians worked in stone rather than earth and wood. further readings Black, Glenn A., Angel Site: An Archaeological, Historical, and Ethnological Study, Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1967. Cole, Fay-Cooper, Robert Bell, John Bennett, Joseph Caldwell, Norman Emerson, Richard MacNeish, Kenneth Orr, and Roger Willis, Kincaid: A Prehistoric Illinois Metropolis, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. Dalan, Rinita A., George R. Holley, William I. Woods, Harold W. Watters, Jr., and John A. Koepke, Envisioning Cahokia: A Landscape Perspective, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Emerson, Thomas E., “An Introduction to Cahokia: Diversity, Complexity, and History,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 27 (2002), 127–48. Emerson, Thomas E., Timothy R. Pauketat, and Susan M. Alt, “Locating American Indian Religion at Cahokia and Beyond,” in Lars Fogelin (ed.), Religion, Archaeology, and the Material World, Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, 2008, pp. 216–36. Holley, George R., “Late Prehistoric Towns in the Southeast,” in Jill E. Neitzel (ed.), Great Towns and Regional Polities in the Prehistoric American Southwest and Southeast, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999, pp. 22–38. Milner, George R., The Cahokia Chiefdom: The Archaeology of a Mississippian Society, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. Pauketat, Timothy R., Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi, New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2007. “Resettled Farmers and the Making of a Mississippian Polity,” American Antiquity 68 (2003), 39–66. 454