Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi

by Timothy R. Pauketat

Overview

The fascinating story of a lost city and an unprecedented American civilization located in modern day Illinois near St. Louis

While Mayan and Aztec civilizations are widely known and documented, relatively few people are familiar with the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico-a site that expert Timothy Pauketat brings vividly to life in this groundbreaking book. Almost a thousand years ago, a city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Built around a sprawling central plaza and known as Cahokia, the site has drawn the attention of generations of archaeologists, whose work produced evidence of complex celestial timepieces, feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of human sacrifice. Drawing on these fascinating finds, Cahokia presents a lively and astonishing narrative of prehistoric America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143117476
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/27/2010
Series:	Penguin Library of American Indian History
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	309,123
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Timothy R. Pauketat is an American archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. After earning a BS in anthropology and earth sciences from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, he worked as a staff archaeologist at the Center for American Archaeology. Pauketat is best known for his research on Cahokia, the center of the large, regional Mississippian culture that extended throughout the Mississippi Valley and tributaries.

Table of Contents

1 The Mother of Native North America 1

2 Supernova 11

3 Walking into Cahokia 25

4 The Original Rolling Stones 36

5 Ghosts of Archaeologists 51

6 Discovery at Mound 72 69

7 Twin Heroes 85

8 American Indian Royalty 99

9 Digging for the Goddess 119

10 Wrestling with the Gods 136

11 Treasure Maps of the Past 151

12 High Plains Drifting 161

Acknowledgments 171

Notes 175

Index 187

Editorial Reviews

"A happy marriage of professional scholarship and childlike enthusiasm." — Kirkus Reviews


"Page by page, Pauketat compiles the fascinating details of a complex archeological puzzle; explaining the study of cross-cultural goddess worship, cave art, hand tools and games, this volume doubles as a crash-course in the archeological method." -- Publishers Weekly


"In "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi," Timothy R. Pauketat tells the story of the mounds, from what archeologists have been able to discover about their origins nearly a thousand years ago to their near ­destruction and partially successful preservation in the modern age."-- The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

Starred Review.

Author and anthropologist Pauketat (Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions) locates a civilizational "big bang" in the Mississippi River valley of 1050 CE, where "social life, political organization, religious belief, art, and culture were radically transformed" by a highly ambitious group of American Indians and their capital city, Cahokia, located east of what is now St. Louis. In this illuminating text, Pauketat examines the life, death, and rediscovery of this vast urban population and their game-changing cultural innovations (ranging from innocuous but influential sports like "chunkey" to large-scale reenactments of mythical stories, featuring bloody human sacrifice). Page by page, Pauketat compiles the fascinating details of a complex archeological puzzle; explaining the study of cross-cultural goddess worship, cave art, hand tools and games, this volume doubles as a crash-course in the archeological method. Pauketat's academic approach responsibly invites opposing viewpoints, and his writing is rich in you-are-there detail, making this an archeological adventure suitable for pre-Columbian enthusiasts as well as inquisitive laymen.
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Publishers Weekly

The latest entry in the Penguin Library of American Indian History traces the history and evolving theories about the large city of Cahokia, which sprang up near the current St. Louis, Mo., around 1050 CE. Largely avoiding academic jargon, Pauketat (Anthropology/Univ. of Illinois; Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions, 2007, etc.) sketches the absorbing story of these people whose enormous earthen structures were for decades assailed by farmers' plows, urban sprawl, the highway system and ignorant neglect. The "3200 acres of great pyramids, spacious plazas, thatched-roof temples, houses, astronomical observatories, and planned neighborhoods" now compose Cahokia Mounds State Park. Scholars estimate that more than 10,000 people once lived in Cahokia (many thousands more were in outlying settlements), a city that emerged so suddenly that Pauketat uses the term "big bang" to describe its advent. He explores various theories for its creation-the timely appearance of a supernova in 1054 might have been a significant factor-and describes how the influential Cahokian culture spread throughout North America. The author is careful to credit his scholarly ancestors in Cahokian studies, including Preston Holder, Melvin Fowler and Warren Wittry. Pauketat describes the enormous cultural significance of the game of chunkey (spears thrown at rolling stone balls), then zeroes in on some key earthen mounds and the bounties they've yielded-especially Mound 72, where multiple human burials were unearthed, including some personages so prominent that they became invaluable in understanding Cahokian politics and theology. Archaeologists also discovered a pit containing evidence of vast feasts, evidenceburied so deeply that the remains still reeked. Among the most engaging late-emerging theories: the significance of women along the full range of the cultural spectrum-from human sacrificial offering to day-laborer to goddess. A happy marriage of professional scholarship and childlike enthusiasm.

Kirkus Reviews