Cahokia : ancient America's great city on the Mississippi

by Timothy R. Pauketat

Paper Book, 2009

Status

Available

Call number

E99 .M6815P375 2009

Publication

New York, N.Y. : Viking, 2009.

Description

Almost a thousand years ago, a Native American city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Cahokia was a thriving metropolis at its height, with a population of 20,000, a sprawling central plaza, and scores of spectacular earthen mounds. The city gave rise to a new culture that spread across the plains; yet by 1400 it had been abandoned, leaving only the giant mounds as monuments, and traces of its influence in tribes we know today. Here, anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat reveals the story of the city and its people as uncovered by American archaeologists. Their excavations have revealed evidence of a powerful society, including complex celestial timepieces, the remains of feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of large-scale human sacrifice. Pauketat provides a comprehensive picture of what's been discovered about Cahokia, and how these findings have challenged our perceptions of Native Americans.--From publisher description.… (more)

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LibraryThing member richardderus

The Book Report: Where today sits St. Louis, Missouri, there once sat a huge Native American city we call Cahokia, absent any other name for it, relating it to a creek that flows through the five-square-mile extent of the known city and suburbs. There are Indian mounds galore here, and there even

is a state park over on the Illinois side of the river. Serious archaeology has been done mostly in front of the bulldozers and the plows of farmers, developers, and the highway builders. Pauketat is one of the region's many dirt archaeologists, the guys who go out and trench interesting sites and keep uber-meticulous notes and drawings and samples of stuff. (GOD doesn't that sound like a painful bore?) Thanks to him and his colleagues, we now know that some sort of major urbanization kick hit the area in 1054 and ended in tears about 1250. Why? (On both counts.) Who? What the hell? Those are the questions raised by the archeology, and treated in concise chapters in this book.

My Review: I am not joking when I say concise. This entire book comes in at 170pp of author's text, plus 15pp of notes and an index. Not a challenging read, right? Wrong. The information conveyed in these pages, with about the expected level of grace from an academic writing about his pernickety, obsessive specialty, is rich and deep. I found myself taking week-long pauses at times, not "oh god what a slog" pauses but "...wait...what...no...wait..." pauses while my inner Bill and Ted tried to work out the IMMENSE and IMPORTANT implications of what I was learning.

Immense indeed. Native Americans are all-too-frequently hagiogrpahized as natural-world-lovin' harmony seekers. Oh really? Explain then, if you please, the six separate sites with as many as seventy sacrificed women buried in the trenches in front of which they were clubbed to death in this MATRILINEAL society? In ranks, meaning the next row stood there while the first row was clubbed to death. Why did the different-genetic-stock neighborhoods outlying Cahokia show the signs of poor diet and overwork that one expects to see in the lower classes, and that are absent from the downtowners? Why is there evidence from as far away as Wisconsin that the Cahokian religion was being proselytized and effectively forced down the throats of the locals via economic might?

Why are these Living Saints, as many counterculture woo-woos have it, suddenly shopping for shoes in the feet of clay department?

I confess that I am uber-gleeful about this. I do not subscribe to a worldview that, once upon a time, before icky-ptoo-ptoo Men got hold of things, there was a beautiful wonderful peaceful womanly world, and matrilineality is the last teensy vestige of that demi-Paradise. Ha! All these sacrifices, hugely overwhelmingly female, in a matrilineal society? Oh dear, got some blood on those girly-hands, don't we?

I also don't for a second buy the "living-in-harmony-with-Mother-Earth" story either. These folks stripped the local landscape bare and planted what supported their chosen life-style. No European involvement possible. When it all came to a halt, the violence of the Plains eternal wars began, and never ended. Massacres (google "Crow Creek" just for giggles), colonization, oh the fun that people have when the lid of powerful neighbors is lifted...all here, present and accounted for in the archeaological record!

So should you read this book? Not unless you're already interested in archeology. If you're a leftover hippie, it's likely to hurt too much. If you're wanting an overview, this ain't it. Definitely for the serious-minded reader.

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LibraryThing member Dejah_Thoris

Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi is a scholarly work intended for a lay audience. Timothy R. Pauketat, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign does a nice job of speculating about Cahokia’s sudden explosion of growth around 1050 CE and

describing the enormous extent of Cahokia and its environs at its prime.

Pauketat outlines the disturbance and destruction of the site from the early European settlers to the modern day highway construction. Interwoven in this story is the tale of the archaeologists who worked the site, often under frantic conditions to save whatever possible before backhoes cleared the way for progress. It becomes clear that theories about Cahokia and its influence have changed drastically over the decades, leaving the reader to wonder if Pauketat’s theories, much of which is admittedly speculative, will be seen as outmoded in twenty or thirty years as well.

My interest in this book was not consistently held. I was fascinated by the possible connection of Cahokia’s beginnings with a supernova, potential links to Mesoamerica, pre-European maps and a discussion of women’s roles, especially in connection to ritual sacrifice. Some of the chapters linking Cahokia with later North American cultural groups were less interesting to me, although how could anyone not be fascinated by a story with someone named He-who-gets-hit-with-deer-lungs?

For me, the book’s greatest flaw is a dearth of photographs, drawings and maps. The addition of images would have been of tremendous benefit to the account. However, the end notes are sufficient to lead an interested reader to additional sources.

This book is not for everyone. While not a guidebook to the modern Cahokia site, it will surely interest some of its reportedly 300,000 visitors each year. The work will also be enjoyed by anyone with a strong interest in Native North Americans.

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LibraryThing member setnahkt

Author Timothy Pauketat is an anthropologist at the University of Illinois; his description of the Cahokia site is fascinating but tragic. The tragic part comes in two stages; the inhabitants of Cahokia were capable of magnificent engineering and administrative works – but were also capable of

gruesome human sacrifices. (Many of the victims were young women, and a significant number were pregnant women). The modern part of the tragedy comes with the destruction of much of the site by development, until the State of Illinois protected it in the 1980s. The Cahokians left no written records, so what’s known comes from careful archaeological work and inferences from surviving native cultures. Pauketat does an terrific job of explaining how the site was handled over the years and what evidence was used to try and deduce how the Cahokians lived. Recommended.
I have to confess I find the topic of human sacrifices of macabre interest. As far as I can tell, every culture has done this sort of thing at some time in their history – Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Cathaginians, Europeans, Chinese, Africans, Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Polynesians. It’s still done; Google “muti murders”. But don’t ask for images.
A good map of the site, not much in the way of other illustrations. No bibliography but references in the endnotes.

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LibraryThing member DavidGoldsteen

Cahokia is a fascinating topic, one of those hidden and surprising areas in American history. The largest -- perhaps only -- true pre-Columbian city in North America, today is a name known only to a small number of people, despite their visible monuments remaining in the St. Louis area.

"Cahokia" is

nicely written, but not exactly the book I would have wanted. Pauketat is a good narrator, but one gets the sense he's chosen a story he feels is a bit too thin. The book feels padded with a history of the history of Cahokia -- the various waves of archaeologists who explored the site and their interpretations. I would have liked more information on the site and culture, even if it was just conjecture. Still, this is a good, easy read for a layperson like myself.

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LibraryThing member KeithAkers

Writing style isn't like the DaVinci Code, but maybe that's a good thing. It does a good, clear job of explaining the whole history of Cahokia that we know of, cutting back and forth from the present to the past. The history of the archeological excavations, with some sites lost to "progress" but

the key site (apparently) preserved, is itself fairly dramatic.

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LibraryThing member noblechicken

While a small book, about 150 pages, it is packed with information! A great introduction to this historic phenomenon that may even be little known or enigmatic to people. The information is well researched and the speculation is great. A good recommended read for those who like Charles Mann's 1491:

New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. An important piece of the puzzle to Native American history. My only complaint is there are NO photographs to accompany the book! :-

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LibraryThing member theageofsilt

Cahokia is the name given to a city that flourished near modern day St. Louis, Missouri around 1050 AD and then, like the cities of the Maya, was abandoned. What is left behind is an enormous plaza, dozens of burial mounds and evidence of mass human sacrifices. The author does a good job of

speculating, in a credible way, about the society, its origins and later influences from limited archeological material. The descriptions of the sites of mass murder are as vividly written and disturbing as anything from a horror novel. This is a fine, easy read for anyone with an interest in archeology, Native American culture or American history.

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LibraryThing member delphica

I will always remember my Time-Life Mysteries of the Ancient World book, which featured a misty picture of the Cahokia mounds and informed us that no one knows who built these mysterious mounds, or why, (oooOOOoooOOOOooo) before moving on to Easter Island. Either the Time-Life people were slacking

off, or more discoveries have been made, because there's enough interesting information about the Cahokians to fill a (small) book.

There's still a lot of "maybe ... or then again, maybe not" going on, there is a lot of speculation, but the book contains plenty of satisfying urban planning, human sacrifice (I made notes in case the 2nd Avenue subway construction drags on too long) and iconography. As a bonus, the author deadpans his way through the recounting of the most entertaining Native American myth I have ever come across.

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LibraryThing member barlow304

Pauketat, who grew up in the St. Louis area, is now an anthropologist at the University of Illinois specializing in the Mississippian culture that developed around Cahokia around 1050. In this book, he explores both the history of Cahokia and the story of its rediscovery and excavation. That

excavation revealed a large, sophisticated city with rituals, festivals, and hinterlands 4 centuries before Columbus and 5 centuries before Cortez.
Suitable for the interested general reader, the book is well written and flows easily back and forth between the distant past and the struggles of modern archaeologists to save the site. Although in the end Pauketat offers no definitive answer, he explores the origins of the Cahokia culture. He considers both the possibility that it arose from Mesoamerican influences and that it developed rapidly and almost spontaneously in the Mississippi valley.
For my tastes, I wish he had spent more time exploring the decline of Cahokia and the way it influenced many of the tribes of middle America. Nonetheless, Professor Pauketat has written an invaluable introduction to the unique city of Cahokia.

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LibraryThing member LynnB

This book is, in my view, misclassified as history. It is really more about archeology: what was discovered at the Cahokia site, and some of the challenges in preserving the site. At the end, it tells us what happened to the scientists that worked there. Not, to me, a satisfying conclusion. I found

the book lacked context of the broader story of Cahokia and the Plains Indians of that time. Without that context, I found the writing disjointed and sometimes hard to follow.

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LibraryThing member unclebob53703

The book is as much about the people doing the science as it is about the science, and seems short on conclusions or any kind of big pictgure.

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