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Cahokia is located in the northern expanse of American Bottom, the largest of the Mississippian flood plains, and opposite St. Louis, Missouri. Byers overturns the current political characterization of this largest known North American prehistoric site north of Mexico. Rather than treating Cahokia as the seat of a dominant Native American polity, a "paramount chiefdom," Byers argues that it must be given a religious characterization as a world renewal cult center. Furthermore, the social and economic powers that it manifests must not be seen to reside in Cahokia itself but in multiple world renewal cults distributed across the American Bottom and in the nearby upland regions.

Byers argues that Cahokia can be thought of as an affiliation of mutually autonomous cults that pooled their labor and other resources and established their collective mission as the performance of world renewal rituals by which to maintain and enhance the sacred powers of the cosmos. The cults, he argues, adopted two forms of sacrifice: one was the incrementally staged manipulation of the deceased (burial, disinterment, bone cleaning, and reburial), with each unfolding step constituting a mortuary act having different and greater world renewal sacrificial force. The other was lethal human sacrifice--probably correlated with long distance warfare by which to procure victims.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
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  1. Contents
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  1. List of Figures
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. List of Tables
  2. pp. ix-x
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  1. Preface
  2. pp. xi-xiv
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  1. 1. Introduction
  2. pp. 1-30
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  1. 2. The Deontic Ecological Perspective
  2. pp. 31-59
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  1. 3. Cultural Traditions and Prehistoric Archaeology
  2. pp. 60-84
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  1. 4. Deontic Ecology, Cultural Traditions, and Social Systems
  2. pp. 85-104
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  1. 5. Mortuary Practices, Cults, and Social Systems
  2. pp. 105-136
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  1. 6. The Sacred Maize Model and the Sponemann Site
  2. pp. 137-162
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  1. 7. The Early Terminal Late Woodland Period Sponemann Community Development
  2. pp. 163-177
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  1. 8. The Development of Terminal Late Woodland Period American Bottom Settlement: The Range Site
  2. pp. 178-222
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  1. 9. Cahokia as a World Renewal Cult Heterarchy
  2. pp. 223-239
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  1. 10. Cahokia as a Hierarchical Monistic Modular Polity: A Critical View
  2. pp. 240-260
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  1. 11. The “Rural” Settlement Pattern
  2. pp. 261-295
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  1. 12. Cahokian Mortuary Practices: The Media of World Renewal Ritual
  2. pp. 296-324
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  1. 13. Mound 72: Funerary Monument or World Renewal Icon?
  2. pp. 325-372
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  1. 14. Integrating the Floodplain and Upland Mortuary Records
  2. pp. 373-402
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  1. 15. The Terminal Late Woodland–Mississippian Transition: Alternative Accounts
  2. pp. 403-448
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  1. 16. The Organizational Principles of Multiple-Mound Locales
  2. pp. 449-472
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  1. 17. The Layout of Cahokia: The Material Media and Outcome of Factionalism
  2. pp. 473-504
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  1. 18. The History and Outcome of Factional Competition in Cahokia
  2. pp. 505-528
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  1. Appendix A. Sponemann Site, Sponemann Phase, Sitewide Ubiquity, and Exclusivity Indices
  2. pp. 529-537
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  1. Appendix B. Sponemann Site, Sponemann Phase, Community 3 Ubiquity, and Exclusivity Indices
  2. pp. 539-546
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 547-572
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 573-586
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 587-599
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