Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the
Mississippi
Timothy R. Pauketat
(Viking Adult, 208 pages, $22.95)
I do not know how many times we visited Cahokia Mounds when I was
a kid, but it had to be in the dozens. If our grade school missed
an annual field trip to the nearby state historic site, then our
Cub Scout troop made up for it. For the most part, we looked at
dull dioramas of half naked Indians shucking corn and mending
blankets. It was not until I reached middle age and picked up
Timothy Pauketat’s new book about Cahokia that I came across the
good stuff.
Approaching the park from Route 157 we would see burial mounds
everywhere. There were mounds in people’s front yards and back
yards. One guy even built a swimming pool into a mound. Not too
long ago mounds were bulldozed to make way for a motel, a
highway, a trailer park. Neighboring St. Louis used to be called
Mound City, till the mounds were used for construction fill.
(Having lived among St. Louisans my whole life, I did not find
this information surprising.) Besides that, most of what we were
told was just plain wrong. The mound builders were not the
Cahokians, nor were they enlightened tree-huggers. We do not know
who mound builders were. The Cahokia tribe did not come to the
area until 1600. What’s more, the Cahokia site is located in
Collinsville. The present-day village of Cahokia lies some 30
miles to the south.
Still as a boy it was fun to climb up the 100-foot Monks Mound
(named after the 18th-century French monks who first documented
the find) and its satellite mounds, which we were told contained
the bones of ancient Indians, and were sort of like the pyramids
in Egypt, only not as cool from an engineering standpoint. In
later years representatives of American Indian groups curtailed
our youthful exuberance, forcing visitors to stick to certain
paths and stairways so as not to desecrate holy ground.
That sacred ground, we now know, was the site of the bloody mass
murder of countless young women, bludgeoned or decapitated en
masse as they stood on the edge of burial pits, sometimes as
many 53 at a time, and not all of them dead when the pits were
filled in. The 53 young women found in Mound 72 were killed so
that two recently deceased twin brothers — royalty, no doubt —
would not have to go to the afterlife unescorted. Fifty-three
girls must not have been enough, because a year later another 39
men and women were sacrificed and buried on the spot. In one
mound, archeologists uncovered 250 corpses. Now, before you blame
the Europeans, Columbus was not born for another three centuries,
and Leif Erickson never got farther south than Newfoundland.
AUTHOR TIMOTHY R. PAUKETAT has poured over the archeological
evidence at Cahokia and his findings have overturned much of what
we thought we knew about pre-Columbian societies. No peace-loving
hunter-gatherers here, Pauketat writes. This civilization was
“characterized by inequality, power struggles and social
complexity.” Here was a caste system made up of an elite ruling
class and a working class. If the mortuary rituals were the
biggest headline-grabber, we also learn that the 12th-century
Cahokians were city dwellers. Cahokia, with its population of
20,000 traders, farmers, priests and astronomers, was the largest
city north of the Rio Grande until 18th-century Philadelphia.
Then, around the year 1200, something happened. Like the future
lost colony of Roanoke, the tribe simply vanished. Pauketat can
only speculate as to what happened. (Even local Illini Indians
could only shrug when European explorers asked who built the
mounds.) The Cahokians were corn farmers as well as unenlightened
lumberjacks, so when deforestation ruined the soil they may have
determined to pack up and move west to hunt buffalo, making that
rare transition from nomads to city dwellers and back to nomads.
Or, it is possible the neighboring tribes downriver who provided
so many of the sacrificial virgin slaves, got fed up and banded
together put the Cahokians to the sword. (Archeologists have
found the remnants of a high two-mile stockade with guard towers
built around the city.) Or there may have been a lower-caste
rebellion — archeologists have found 50 skeletons
unceremoniously dumped in one pit, some with arrowheads in the
back, some beheaded. Or maybe they simply did not have
satisfactory toilet facilities for 20,000 people.
Personally, I prefer the last theory. Kind of gives Montezuma’s
revenge a whole new meaning. Whatever the case, the next time I
take my son and his friends to Cahokia Mounds the trip is going
to be a whole lot more interesting. I guarantee it.
