Cahokia: North America's First City | Live Science Mann notes: Nineteenth century writers attributed the mound complexes to, among others, the Chinese, the Welsh, the Phoenicians, the lost nation of Atlantis, and various biblical personages. The World History Encyclopedia logo is a registered trademark. All living things belonged to a complex matrix that was simultaneously spiritual and material. Covering five square miles and housing at least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the biggest concentration of people north of the Rio Grande until the eighteenth century. While Cahokians cleared some land in the uplands, Dr. Mt. There are two main ideas for why people left Cahokia: societal problems and environmental problems. Beside the massive, 10-story Monk's Mound is a grand plaza that was used for religious ceremonies and for playing the American Indian sport chunkey, involving distinctive stone discs later unearthed by archaeologists. Some of these mounds had residences of the upper-class built on their flat tops, others served as burial sites (as in the case of the famous tomb of the ruler known as Birdman, buried with 50 sacrificial victims) and the purpose of still others is unknown. Rather than absolutely ruining the landscape, she added, Cahokians seem to have re-engineered it into something more stable. I also discuss why I think climate change is part of the reason why people eventually left Cahokia. In an impressive display of engineering savvy, the Cahokians encapsulated the slab, sealing it off from the air by wrapping it in thin, alternating layers of sand and clay. 30 Apr 2023. Isotopes in bone from burials (see Religion, Power and Sacrifice section for more information) tells us that more powerful people at Cahokia ate more meat and probably had a healthier diet than commoners. The Adena/Hopewell cultivated barley, marsh elder, may grass, and knotweed, among others while the people of Cahokia had discovered corn, squash, and beans the so-called three sisters and cultivated large crops of all three. Please support World History Encyclopedia. [3], The remnant Cahokia, along with the Michigamea, were absorbed by the Kaskaskia and finally the Peoria people. And we dont know why people were leaving. Were moving away from a Western explanationthat they overused this or failed to do thatand instead were appreciating that they related to their environment in a different way., And that suggests that hypotheses for Cahokias decline and collapse are likely to become more complex. The sand acts as a shield for the slab. "The Tribes of the Illinois Confederacy." In the 1990s, interpretations of archaeological research led to the proposal that the Cahokians at the height of their citys population had cut down many trees in the area. Because the people next to the special grave goods and the young men and women a little farther away were buried at the same time as Birdman, many archaeologists think that they were human sacrifices who were killed to honor him or his family, show his power, or as an important religious act. Cahokians were part of what anthropologists call Mississippian culturea broad diaspora of agricultural communities that stretched throughout the American Southeast between 800 and 1500 A.D. World History Encyclopedia. To save chestnut trees, we may have to play God, Why you should add native plants to your garden, What you can do right now to advocate for the planet, Why poison ivy is an unlikely climate change winner. That's true, says Fritz, a paleoethnobotanist . Hypotheses are abundant, but data are scarce. Doctoral student A.J. The inhabitants of Cahokia did not use a writing system, and researchers today rely heavily on archaeology to interpret it. Much of archaeological research involves forming hypotheses to explain observations of past phenomena. Cahokia is a modern-day historical park in Collinsville, Illinois, enclosing the site of the largest pre-Columbian city on the continent of North America. Cahokias decline wasnt something that happened overnight, he says. Map of Mississippian and Related CulturesWikipedia (CC BY-NC-SA). Michael Dolan/Flickr According to these lake sediments, the Central Mississippi Valley started getting more rain in the 900s. The people who built Cahokia, for instance, had a choice spot for city building, he says. Our latest articles delivered to your inbox, once a week: Our mission is to engage people with cultural heritage and to improve history education worldwide. While we will never know for sure, it is possible that a similar event happened at Cahokia. On the other hand, the fact that there are many large mounds at Cahokia, not just Monks Mound, suggests that power may have been shared. By some estimates, Cahokia was more populous than London in the twelfth century. Its how theyre managing and exploiting resources., (In this episode of our podcastOverheard, we chat with an anthropologist working to protect the remaining burial mounds and sacred shrines of Cahokia so that the descendants of the ancient city's founders can keep its legacy alive. It has been a special place for centuries. hide caption. Grave goods also tell us about a persons importance. The citys water supply was a creek (Canteen Creek) which the Cahokians diverted so it joined another (modern-day Cahokia Creek), bringing more water to the city to supply the growing population. But those clues still need to be investigated, researchers say. My name is AJ and Ive been an archaeologist for about 10 years. They were likely buried with this person to help him in the afterlife. Mark, Joshua J.. By 1150 CE, people started to leave Cahokia. The story of Cahokia has mystified archaeologists ever since they laid eyes on its earthen moundsscores of them, including a 10-story platform mound that until 1867 was the tallest manmade structure in the United States. The clergy, who were held responsible for the peoples misfortunes as they had obviously failed to interpret the will of the gods and placate them, initiated reforms, abandoning the secretive rituals on top of Monks Mound for full transparency in front of the populace on the plateau but this effort, also, came too late and was an ineffective gesture. If it is true that Cahokia was a magnet city for many peoples, ethnic or cultural barriers between different groups could have led to political tension, he says. The religious authorities are thought to have sent out word that they were going to build a great mound and, according to one view, people from many different regions came to participate; according to another, the central authority conscripted workers from other communities as forced labor. Its more like a natural progression as people slowly ebb out of an urban environment that stops meeting their needs. Dr. Rankin and her colleagues set out to discover more about how Cahokias environment changed over the course of its development, which they hoped would test whether that hypothesis was true. . A thousand years ago, a city rose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near what eventually became the city of St. Louis. Map of Mississippian and Related Cultures. There was a wide plaza for merchants, a residential area for the common people and another for the upper-class, a ball court, a playing field for the game known as Chunkey, fields of corn and other crops, solar calendar of wooden poles, and the mounds which served as residences, sometimes graves, and for religious and political purposes. UC Berkeley archaeologist A.J. Now, new evidence suggests a dramatic change in climate might have led to the culture's collapse in the 1300s. That finding is in keeping with our knowledge of Cahokian agriculture, says Jane Mt. Now an archaeologist has likely ruled out one hypothesis for Cahokias demise: that flooding caused by the overharvesting of timber made the area increasingly uninhabitable. Indeed, spirit power could be found in every plant, animal, rock, wind, cloud, and body of water but in greater concentration in some than others. We shouldnt project our own problems onto the past. Archeologists call their way of life the Mississippian culture and Cahokia was the largest and most important Mississippian site ever built. Its core is a slab of clay about 900 feet long, 650 feet wide, and more than 20 feet tall. Help our mission to provide free history education to the world! The authority figures of the Adena and later Hopewell cultures were also responsible for the cultivation of tobacco which was used in religious rituals which took place at the top of these mounds, out of sight of the people, or on artificial plateaus created in the center or below the mound where public rituals were enacted. Archaeology is not like physics, where you can set up controlled experiments and get the answers youre looking for, Rankin says. They hypothesized that Cahokians had deforested the uplands to the east of the city, leading to erosion and flooding that would have diminished their agricultural yields and flooded residential areas. The religious beliefs of the Mississippian peoples, as well as Native Americans in general, are summarized by scholar Alan Taylor: North American natives subscribed to animism: a conviction that the supernatural was a complex and diverse web of power woven into every part of the natural world. A higher proportion of oxygen 18, a heavier isotope of the element, suggests greater rains, providing researchers with a year-by-year record of rainfall reaching back hundreds of years. Some scholars now believe that people were repeatedly invited to take up residence in the city to replace those who had died and graves containing obvious victims of human sacrifice suggest that the people were becoming desperate for help from their gods (although human sacrifice was practiced earlier as seen in the tomb of the ruler referred to as Birdman). After Monks Mound was completed, or while it was ongoing (as it is thought to have been built in stages), other mounds were constructed as well as temples such as the one which once topped Monks Mound. While it is hard to prove what Woodhenge was used for, it was likely a sort of calendar that marked the changing of the seasons and the passing of time. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from "Cahokia," by . 2 hours of sleep? The mound had been in a low-lying area near a creek that would likely have flooded according the wood-overuse hypothesis, but the soil showed no evidence of flood sediments. This ancient marvel rivaled Romes intricate network of roads, For some long COVID patients, exercise is bad medicine, Radioactive dogs? This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. The Hopewell Culture is the immediate predecessor to the people who built Cahokia but the two are not thought to have been the same. But a recent study heaps new evidence on another theory, one contending that changing climate, and its influence on agriculture, were the forces that made the cities flourish, then drove them to collapse. Its metabolism depended on an area of high natural and agricultural productivity. What Caitlin has done in a very straightforward fashion is look at the evidence, and theres very little evidence to support the Western view of what native people are doing, Dr. Kelly said. When European settlers and explorers first encountered ancient mounds in America, like the ones at Cahokia, many did not believe that Native Americans could have built them. It was the start of the Little Ice Age. These people, however, had no idea who had built the mounds, leaving the question open for speculation. Mann cites geographer and archaeologist William Woods of the University of Kansas, who has excavated at Cahokia for over 20 years, in describing the construction of the great mound: Monks Mound [so-called for a group of Trappist monks who lived nearby in the 18th and 19th centuries] was the first and most grandiose of the construction projects. it was a planned city built by an organized Mississippian labor force using mathematical and engineering skills. But by the time European colonizers set foot on American soil in the 15th century, these cities were already empty. While heavy plow techniques quickly exhausted soil and led to the clearing of forests for new farmland, hand tool-wielding Cahokians managed their rich landscape carefully. Most likely, there was one leader or group that was more important than others, but their power was not total. On top of many of the earthwork mounds were temples and sacrificial sites, some with evidence of human sacrifices. Those soil layers showed that while flooding had occurred early in the citys development, after the construction of the mounds, the surrounding floodplain was largely spared from major flooding until the industrial era. Women shaped cuisine, culture of ancient Cahokia - The Source As for the city's downfall, it might have succumbed not just to climate but also to warfare for cultural or territorial reasons. New clues rule out one theory. And that allowed the Mississippians to build a society with complex recreation and religious practices, he says. It is important to note that the Cahokia area was home to a later Native American village and . And the reason for that is clear: We do see that happening in past societies, and we fear that it is happening in our own. By 1150 CE, people started to leave Cahokia. The most common type, or isotope, of nitrogen is nitrogen-14; the less common type, nitrogen-15 has one more neutron and so it is a little heavier. People have lived in the Cahokia region for thousands of years, but around 1000 CE local people and immigrants from other parts of the continent/other parts of the Mississippi River Valley began to gather there in large numbers. World History Publishing is a non-profit company registered in the United Kingdom. For comparison, it was not until the late 1700s that American cities like New York City and Philadelphia had more people than Cahokia. Because these resources were They fertilized fields with manure. Some scientists believe the flood and droughts were part of climate change as the MCO transitioned to the. Flooding of the Mississippi River today affects many people and causes billions of dollars in damage; it is likely that the flood around 1150 CE destroyed farms and possibly houses in the low-lying areas of Cahokia. By the 1900s it was clear to archaeologists that Native Americans built and lived in Cahokia (this was clear to Native Americans the whole time, if only people would listen). American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Vol. Near the end of the MCO the climate around Cahokia started to change: a huge Mississippi River flood happened around 1150 CE and long droughts hit the area from 1150-1250 CE. "We switch to profound drought at A.D. 1350," Bird says. Woodhenge: a series of large circles made of wooden posts at Cahokia that align with astronomical features, Ochre: a red pigment made from the same mineral as rust, Solstice: when the sun is at its highest (summer) or lowest (winter) point in the sky and day or night is the longest, Equinox: when the sun is exactly between its highest and lowest points in the sky and day and night are about the same length. In Cahokia and in most settled Native American cultures, the surplus farming of a variety of agricultural crops. Mound:Structure made of soil, gravel, sand, or other similar materials. The modern-day designation Mississippian Culture refers to the Native American people who inhabited the Mississippi River Valley, Ohio River Valley, and Tennessee River Valley, primarily, but were spread out in separate communities all the way down to present-day Louisiana as well as points north and east. Web. But my favorite project that Ive worked on isnt far away in fact its right here in America at a place called Cahokia. It was rebuilt several times to eventually be over 400 feet across with 72 posts. It may not be the whole story, though, says Pauketat. Frontiers | Cahokia: Urbanization, Metabolism, and Collapse Pleasant, professor emeritus of agricultural science at Cornell University, who was not involved in the study. However, the people next to Birdman may have chosen to die with him. Maybe they were heedless of their environment and maybe they werent, Rankin says, but we certainly shouldnt assume they were unless theres evidence of it. The equinoxes and solstices were probably important dates when festivals and religious events were held and Woodhenge marked the occasions. STDs are at a shocking high. Heres how paradise fought back. We theorize that they were probably painted red due to traces of ochre found by archaeologists in the ground at Woodhenge. These racist views led some to bizarre explanations, including giants, Vikings, or Atlanteans. Im excited to share with you the story of Cahokia, the first city in America. Mississippian: Environment The largest mound covered fifteen acres. But its not likely that they saw natural resources as commodities to be harvested for maximum private profit. In later years, Cahokians built a stockade encircling central Cahokia, suggesting that inter-group warfare had become a problem. Submitted by Joshua J. Many archaeologists argue that studying past human response to climate change can be helpful in informing future strategies to adapt to modern effects of climate change; however, archaeological research is rarely utilized in climate change policy. It spread over a great area of the Southeast and the mid-continent, in the river valleys of what are now the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, with . They also grew squash, sunflower and other domesticated crops and also ate a variety of wild plants. The earliest mound dated thus far is the Ouachita Mound in Louisiana which was built over 5,400 years ago and later mounds have been discovered from Ohio down to Florida and the east coast to the Midwest. This practice, they said, led to widespread deforestation, erosion and increasingly severe and unpredictable local flooding. Those other cultural centers were probably copying Cahokia, he says. Cahokia is thought to have begun as just another small village, one of many, located between a forest and a river on a wide plain conducive to agriculture. Archaeologists studied the amount of nitrogen isotopes in the bones from Mound 72 to learn what people ate. As a member of the Illinois Confederation, the Cahokia were likely similar to other Illinois groups in culture, economy, and technology. But while that narrative resonates in a time of massive deforestation, pollution and climate change, she says its a mistake to assume that such practices are universal. Just a couple of centuries after the Mississippian cultures reached their prime, the medieval warming trend started to reverse, in part because of increased volcanic activity on the planet. As an archaeologist, Ive been able to travel to Egypt, Jordan, and Vietnam, working on excavations to find artifacts and other clues that tell us about life in the past. Other burials at Mound 72 include four young men without hands or heads and over 50 young women stacked together in rows. This newfound behavior may offer a clue to how these reptiles will respond to a warming planet. There are two main ideas for why people left Cahokia: societal problems and environmental problems. [4], Although the Cahokia tribe is no longer a distinct polity, its cultural traditions continue through the federally recognized Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.[4][5]. All rights reserved. Environmental factors, like drought from the Little Ice Age (1303-1860), may have played a role in the citys slow abandonment. Several men and women were buried next to Birdman and his special grave goods, which may mean that these people were his family members or important members of society. Birdman was probably really important and powerful because he was buried with so many nice things, similar to King Tuts tomb in Egypt. Most of the earthworks were shaped like big cones and stepped pyramids, but some were sculpted into enormous birds, lizards, bears, long-tailed alligators and, in Peebles, Ohio, a 1,330-foot-long serpentNone of the mounds cover burials or contain artifacts or show signs of use. Confluence: a place where two rivers join to become one larger river, Mississippian: the general way of life of people in the Mississippi River Valley from the Great Lakes to Louisiana from about 1000-1400 CE, Maize: corn, but with a smaller cob than what you see in stores today, Isotopes: atoms of the same element that have different weights and are present in different amounts in foods, Flintknapper: someone who makes stone tools like arrowheads, Chunkey: a ball game played in many Native American cultures, including at Cahokia in the past and by many tribes today, Palisade: a wall made out of posts stuck into the ground, Environmental Degradation: harming an environment through things like deforestation or pollution. Nature dictated that the settlement rise near the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Nor did the peoples of Cahokia vanish; some eventually became the Osage Nation. Cahokia shows us that human sacrifice is complicated at Mound 72 some people were certainly forced to die, but others may have chosen to die along with someone they loved or found very important. But the good times didn't last. As the largest urban center on the continent, Cahokia became a center of religious devotion and trade. Perhaps the prime location and not just the amount of rain helped the city come to prominence, he says. Cahokia, calling it a lost or vanished city, and focus entirely on its disappearance. This makes it seem that the Native American people who lived in Cahokia vanished as well, but that is not the case. Only one ancient account mentions the existence of Xerxes Canal, long thought to be a tall tale. As Cahokia grew more powerful, more immigrants arrived, perhaps against their will as captives from war or by choice as families looking for work and a good life.
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