CAHOKIA: ANCIENT AMERICA’S GREAT CITY ON THE MISSISSIPPI - TIMOTHY R. PAUKETAT

I read this on the plane rides out and back to Kansas. It was nice piece of serendipity to get to see the landscape that was/is the background to the huge earthen pyramids the Cahokians built almost 1000 years ago. Personally, I find the midwest’s vastness and flatness terrifying. It gives me the impression of being lost at sea. However, I can imagine how making that unending plane of ground dramatically rise up out of nowhere into a pyramid would have a very dramatic effect. 

The topic of this book is another one of those things you get mad about not learning in school. Typically, if Native American are covered at all in US public schools it’s only the period during which they meet the Europeans or, sometimes if you’re lucky, the period right before this (i.e. what was life like for Squanto before 1614). But, of course, people had been living in these areas for thousands of years and there is exactly that amount of history to cover. This book does a good job filling in some of that deliberately ignored period between when people crossed the Bering Strait into the western hemisphere and Columbus. I remember seeing some “Indian Mounds” around the South as a child but it was never explained to me that there existed a Native society that was building some of the largest pyramids in the world during the European Dark Age. The largest pyramid, which I haven’t seen but now hope to, is as wide as the stone ones in Egypt. 

This book is doing two things at once. It is trying to synthesize and summarize all of what we think we know about Cahokia and the people who built it, lived there and were affected by it, and it’s also trying to explain why we know so little about these people. That second thread that the book is pursuing is either not very interesting (there are all sorts of micro-biographies of different archeologists who have worked on the sites) or infuriating (the book does a good job highlighting all the times that highway builds have destroyed and paved over huge swaths of archeologically significant areas). But that first thread is great. Because so much is not known about the people who lived in the societies that built the mounds we’re treated to a lot of speculation. Right off the bat, Pauketat connects a supernova that was visible to the naked eye in 1054 BCE to the founding of the city. There doesn’t seem any direct evidence of this besides the fact that this event (the supernova, which is now the crab nebula) was recorded by people all over the world (since astronomy was a very big deal to various ancient people’s, from China to Peru) and was a very big deal (it looked like there was a totally new star in the sky) and, temporally, this lines up with when the carbon-dating tell us construction started, ergo, this celestial miracle seems like the sort of thing that would compel one to found a city. I’m not sure that makes the most sense in the world, but I like the idea either way. There is lots of discussion about a game called Chunkey, which involves trying to throw darts/spears through a moving hoop, and how versions Chunkey and Chunkey stones are found all over North America and how this might show us Cahokia’s reach. When White People did arrive in the midwest, centuries after the fall of Cahokia, they would find people taking the game seriously enough to wager everything they owned on it. 

To my mind the most interesting stuff in the book has to do with Cahokia’s connection to Mesoamerica. Already when you see the mounds themselves, it’s easy to jump to thoughts about Mayan or Aztec or other southern, pyramids. Add to that a huge sociopolitical importance placed on a game played in a plaza, as well as similarities in their cosmologies and mythologies (there’s lots of wonderful stories about a trans-American hero named He-Who-Wears-Human-Heads-As-Earrings) as well as evidence of human sacrifice at Cahokia and it’s hard not to speculate (and to get mad all over again that most of the evidence that could shed some light on this was destroyed because people weren’t willing to move a fucking highway a few miles) about a connection. It’s also hard not to think how this experience with a large urban center and rigid hierarchy and human sacrifice shaped the various tribes and nations that arose and developed after Cahokia, which were the peoples that Europeans encountered a centuries later. Either way, made me want to take a trip to St. Louis to see some of these pyramids and I’m always happy to fill in a small section of history I didn’t know anything about. 77 earthen mounds.