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  • Cahokia: An Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat
  • Donald A. Yerxa

ALMOST 1,000 YEARS AGO THE CITY OF CAHOKIA EMERGED with amazing suddenness on the edge of the Mississippi River where only a few small towns and villages had once existed. Cahokia became the hub of a major pre-Columbian Indian nation, but by 1400 the sprawling city had disappeared. Only the giant earthen mounds remained. Timothy R. Pauketat’s recent book, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (Viking, 2009), reconstructs this mysterious culture, drawing on the work of a number of archaeologists, including his own. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Pauketat, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, on November 13, 2009.

Donald A. Yerxa:

Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of the rise and fall of Cahokia?

Timothy R. Pauketat:

Cahokia’s rise has been a particular interest of mine, and it remains a work in progress, since the more we know, the better questions we ask and the more we keep developing our explanation. The fall of Cahokia isn’t as dynamic of a research topic, but we still have a good general idea of what was happening. So here it goes.

Cahokia’s rise can be broken down into the slow growth of what I’ve called “Old Cahokia,” and the abrupt transformation of that big village into what I call “New Cahokia.” It’s New Cahokia that you see today, the city with pyramids and plazas. Old Cahokia was a very large agricultural village, possibly the seat of a loose confederation of villages or perhaps regional communities of people who minimally ranged across most of the northern American Bottom (which is the large patch of Mississippi River floodplain east of modern-day St. Louis), and maximally might have included other agricultural villages farther up and down the Mississippi. Farming was good in the American Bottom, and especially around Old Cahokia, which began to attract immigrants around 800 A.D. By 1000, in fact, Cahokia was probably the largest village in the Midwest, with perhaps 1,000–2,000 residents. That might have been it, end of story.

But—and we’re not really sure why—around 1050 the Cahokians redesigned their village into a city, with numerous large earthen pyramids surrounding one large plaza, and lesser pyramids enclosing smaller plazas to the north, east, and west. Many immigrants poured in, both local farmers from nearby villages and people from as far away as southern Missouri and northeast Arkansas. Something was attracting them, and it had to have truly tugged at their sensibilities, because Cahokia swelled pretty quickly to about 10,000 people. And that population estimate doesn’t include Cahokia’s suburbs, outlying towns, and new satellite villages, many of which were also being founded and populated in the years immediately after 1050. All of this gives one the impression of a great expansive new culture, which is why I’ve dubbed it ancient America’s Big Bang.

We have found and analyzed massive deposits of refuse from giant religious festivals dating to the decades after 1050. At one of these festivals Cahokians butchered 2,000 deer, cooked large fish and vats of pumpkin and sumpweed soups and stews, ate many berries, and smoked large amounts of strong tobacco. Unprecedented sacrificial rituals began shortly after 1050. These seem to have involved the sacrificing of young adult women every decade or so; the exact timing is still speculative. Such activity suggests that Cahokians were building a new religion that attracted followers from surrounding regions.


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A photograph from David Ives Bushnell, The Cahokia and Surrounding Mound Groups (Peabody Museum, 1904).

Yerxa:

How has our understanding of Cahokia changed in recent decades?

Pauketat:

Cahokia was misunderstood for a long time, even into the 1990s. Many archaeologists didn’t stop to think of the historical impacts that Cahokia and Cahokians might have had on the entire middle of the continent. Now archaeologists think about history differently, and they are beginning to appreciate that Cahokians had tremendous effects on American Indians’ identities and heritage for centuries, even impacting the ways in which Europeans colonized...

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