Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World

Abstract

Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World. Edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. x, 360. Charts, illustrations, index, maps, notes, photographs, references, and tables. Cloth, $55.00) Explaining Cahokia is crucial to North American archaeology, declare the editors of this book, its place in the larger political and ethnic developments of precontact America and given its world-historical significance (p. 26). They have accomplished their objective so well in their thirteen chapters future research on Cahokia will begin with their work. extensive of mounds and plazas in the Illinois American Bottom, on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, has long intrigued both the general public and archaeologists. Elites (including paramount chief, religious leaders, and mortuary officials) ruled Cahokia with system archaeologists identify as complex chiefdom. lords led the community in the construction of monuments which symbolized their power and place in the universe, and these examples of earthen monumental architecture are more massive than any others in North America. political and economic changes began the Mississippian cultural phase ushered in by Cahokia came to the American Bottom so quickly, about A.D. 1050, Timothy Pauketat terms it Big Bang. elites seized control of the northern American Bottom and collected the commoners from the surrounding area. Lords behanded and beheaded those commoners who objected to these developments, and then dishonorably interred them. lords buried certain members of the elite class on top of the resistors, but interred them with distinction. It is noteworthy there were no violent deaths before 1050, and most burials away from the mounds were not elaborate. construction and reconstruction of plazas and mounds, and other examples of monumental architecture, reflect the ability of the elites to marshal enormous numbers of human laborers. Cahokians began the Grand Plaza just after 1050, and completed it by about 1100. It represents a complicated sequence of [earth] borrowing, leveling, reclamation, and construction... (p. 93). This plaza was more than large enough to contain the entire population of Cahokia during various ceremonies. Cahokians built Monks Mound, the largest mound, north of the Grand Plaza between 1100 and 1200. It rises to an elevation of 30 meters (100 feet) in three principal terraces and fourth eroded terrace (p. 11). It is possible mound is metaphor for earth.... notes John Kelly. cycle of birth, death, and rebirth are linked to the earth, the ultimate source of fertility (p. 165). lords took up residence in large dwellings, consumed choice portions of deer and turkey meat, and managed both construction and the production of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. wealthy elites even subsidized the manufacture of such items as axeheads, shell bead necklaces, arrowheads, stone figurines, and copper ornaments. All Cahokians were members of ranked social groups. Commoners lived in smaller dwellings, where they probably maintained sedentary, monogamous, and patilocal households (p. 138). non-elites performed communal, agricultural, and craft labor. The processes at the core of Cahokian political economy were ideological, declares Timothy Pauketat; that is, change was mediated by ideologies or the sets of values, beliefs, and attitudes shared differently by groups or subgroups, dominant or subordinate, within social formation (pp. …

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