Cahokia

Cahokia

Almost a thousand years ago, around the year 1050, a Native American city named Cahokia seemingly sprung up out of nowhere along the banks of the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Social life, political organization, religious belief, art and culture of the Mississippi River Valley were radically transformed. Yet by 1400, Cahokia had been abandoned. In Cahokia, anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat explores the mystery of ancient America’s one true city north of Mexico, as uncovered by the dramatic digs of American Corn-Belt archaeologists.

At its height Cahokia was a thriving metropolis with a population of at least 10,000, and at least 20,000 or 30,000 more in the outlying towns and farming settlements ranging for 50 miles in each direction. Now the core of what remains of Cahokia’s 3,200 acres of great pyramids, spacious plazas, thatched roof temples, houses, astronomical observatories and planned neighborhoods is preserved within a state park, with the rest wedged between highways and buried beneath factories and houses in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area.

Pauketat introduces us to the archaeologists who have over the years dug away at this central puzzle in American archaeology, excavating the evidence of a powerful society marked by rapid political and social change, an abrupt burst—a “big bang”—of large-scale construction and disturbing signs of mass killings thought to be a form of human sacrifice.

This and other evidence points to a connection between Cahokia and Mesoamerica, and Pauketat examines connections between Cahokian and Mesoamerican buildings, mythologies and sacrificial practices. He also vividly describes what Cahokia must have been like in its heyday as he takes us step by step on an imaginary two-day traveler’s journey into the heart of the city.

Pauketat also discusses the many puzzles that still remain about Cahokia, including exactly why the city failed, why Cahokia is virtually absent from indigenous narratives and cultural memory. And he explains how the evidence of a Cahokian metropolis with power concentrated in the hands of urban elites has challenged long-held perceptions of Native Americans as egalitarian peoples freely roaming the continent.

Drawing on a wealth of analysis by historians and archaeologists, this fifth title in the Penguin Library of American Indian History is a lively read and a compelling reexamination of the conventional Native American narrative.

Hardcover: 208 pages

Publisher: Viking Penguin/Div of Penguin Putnam ( August 03, 2009 )

Item #: 93-8378

ISBN: 9780670020904

Product Dimensions: 5.125 x 7.5 x 0.49 inches

Product Weight: 8.0 ounces