Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language they spoke. They were not “Cahokians”—that name, itself a linguistic garble, comes from an unrelated group that migrated to the area almost a thousand years later. Archaeologists are unlikely to find a better name, though. According to William Woods, the geographer and archaeologist at the University of Kansas, Monks Mound completely covers whatever habitation these people had before they built Cahokia. To see the remaining traces of this early settlement, scientists would have to jack up the whole enormous pile and dig underneath. Almost all that can be known with certainty about this initial group is that it belonged to a diverse, four-thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the construction of large earthen mounds.
Based around the Mississippi and its associated rivers, these societies scattered tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They were especially concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but nearly as many are found in the Southeast. Highways, farms, and housing developments have destroyed most of them, and scientists have investigated only a small fraction of the survivors. 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 serpent.
The Ouachita mounds as they may have appeared at their creation, 5,400 years ago.
(Illustration Credit 8.2)
The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture. For reasons unknown, Indians heaved up a ring of eleven irregularly sized mounds, most of them connected by a ridge, on a hill overlooking the course of the Ouachita River. The biggest was as tall as a two-story house. About a dozen similar sites are known, of which the Ouachita ring is the oldest and biggest. None of the mounds in any of these places cover burials or contain artifacts or show signs of use. Indeed, they seem to have so little purpose that archaeologist Joe Saunders of Northeast Louisiana University, whose team excavated the Ouachita mounds in 1997, half-jokingly speculated to Science that the motive for building them could have been the act of construction itself. “I know it sounds awfully Zen-like,” he conceded.
Because modern-day hunter-gatherers in Africa live in egalitarian bands that constantly move from place to place, archaeologists assumed that Native American hunter-gatherers must also have done so. Discovering the Louisiana mounds upset this view: they suggest that at least some early Indians were stay-at-homes. More important, they testify to levels of public authority and civic organization rarely associated with nomads. Building a ring of mounds with baskets or deerskins full of dirt is a long-term enterprise. During construction the workers must eat, which in turn means that other people must provide their food. Such levels of planning are ordinarily thought to kick in with the transition to agriculture. When people till and sow the land, anthropologists say, they set up systems to protect their investment. Eventually somebody ends up in charge of allocating goods and services. But the mound builders in Louisiana built these massive constructions at a time when agriculture was barely under way—it was like the whiff in the air from a faraway ocean. In the central river valleys of North America, people had a way of life without known analogue.
After these first mounds the record is sparse. After the Ouachita mounds, there is a gap in the record of more than a millennium. The curtain parts again in about 1500 B.C., when an archipelago of villages, the largest known as Poverty Point, grew up in the northeast corner of Louisiana. Located fifty-five miles from the Ouachita site, Poverty Point had as a focus a structure resembling an amphitheater: six concentric, C-shaped ridges, each five feet tall, on a bluff facing the river. The jaws of the widest C are 3,950 feet apart, an expanse so big that scientists did not recognize the ridges as constructions until they took aerial photographs of the site in the 1950s.
Now another gap: seven hundred years. The next major sequence occurs mainly in the Ohio Valley, hundreds of miles north. Here was a group known as the Adena—the name is that of a well-known site. Because Adena mounds served as tombs, researchers know more about their deaths than their lives. Accompanying the noble few in the tombs to the world of the deceased were copper beads and bracelets, stone tablets and collars, textiles and awls, and, sometimes, stone pipes in the shape of surreal animals. The head of the creature faced the user, who sucked in tobacco smoke from its mouth. Adena tobacco, a different species from the tobacco in cigarettes today, contains several hallucinogens and five to ten times as much nicotine—enough, all told, to make it psychoactive.
Tobacco was only one of the crops grown at Adena villages. The Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and much of the U.S. Southeast were home to what is known as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. A full-fledged agricultural revolution with a multifarious suite of crops, the complex is an example of a major cultural innovation that has completely disappeared. Its crops were such unfamiliar plants as marshelder, knotweed, maygrass, and little barley. All of these species still exist; one could stock a specialty restaurant with them. (Sample menu: maygrass patties, steamed knotweed beans, and buffalo tongue.) No one seems to be doing that, though. In fact, farmers today treat several of these crops as weeds—they routinely blast little barley with herbicides. Archaeologists have tentative indications of early domestication in spots from Illinois to Alabama by 1000 B.C. But agriculture did not begin to flower, so to speak, until the Adena.
(Map credit 8.1)
Adena influence in customs and artifacts can be spotted in archaeological sites from Indiana to Kentucky and all the way north to Vermont and even New Brunswick. For a long time researchers believed this indicated that the Adena had conquered other groups throughout this area, but many now believe that the influence was cultural: like European teenagers donning baggy pants and listening to hip-hop, Adena’s neighbors adopted its customs. Archaeologists sometimes call the area in which such cultural flows occur an “interaction sphere.” Both less and more than a nation, an interaction sphere is a region in which one society disseminates its symbols, values, and inventions to others; an example is medieval Europe, much of which fell under the sway of Gothic aesthetics and ideas. The Adena interaction sphere lasted from about 800 B.C. to about 100 B.C.
Textbooks sometimes say that the Adena were succeeded by the Hopewell, but the relation is unclear; the Hopewell may simply have been a later stage of the same culture. The Hopewell, too, built mounds, and like the Adena seem to have spoken an Algonkian language. (“Hopewell” refers to the farmer on whose property an early site was discovered.) Based in southern Ohio, the Hopewell interaction sphere lasted until about 400 A.D. and extended across two-thirds of what is now the United States. Into the Midwest came seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, silver from Ontario, fossil shark’s teeth from Chesapeake Bay, and obsidian from Yellowstone. In return the Hopewell exported ideas: the bow and arrow, monumental earthworks, fired pottery (Adena pots were not put into kilns), and, probably most important, the Hopewell religion.
The Hopewell apparently sought spiritual ecstasy by putting themselves into trances, perhaps aided by tobacco. In this enraptured state, the soul journeys to other worlds. As is usually the case, people with special abilities emerged to assist travelers through the portal to the numinous. Over time these shamans became gatekeepers, controlling access to the supernatural realm. They passed on their control and privileges to their children, creating a hereditary priesthood: counselors to kings, if not kings themselves. They acquired healing lore, mastered and invented ceremonies, learned the numerous divinities in the Hopewell pantheon. We know little of these gods today, because few of their images have endured to the present. Presumably shamans recounted their stories to attentive crowds; almost certainly, they explained when and where the gods wanted to build mounds.
In the context of the village, the mound, visible everywhere, was as much a beacon as a medieval cathedral. As with Gothic churche
s, which had plazas for the outdoor performance of sacred mystery plays, the mounds had greens before them: ritual spaces for public use. Details of the performances are lost, but there is every indication that they were exuberant affairs. “There is a stunning vigor about the Ohio Hopewell …,” Silverberg wrote,
a flamboyance and fondness for excess that manifests itself not only in the intricate geometrical enclosures and the massive mounds, but in these gaudy displays of conspicuous consumption [in the tombs]. To envelop a corpse from head to feet in pearls, to weigh it down in many pounds of copper, to surround it with masterpieces of sculpture and pottery, and then to bury everything under tons of earth—this betokens a kind of cultural energy that numbs and awes those who follow after.
Vibrant and elaborate, perhaps a little vulgar in its passion for display, Hopewell religion spread through most of the eastern United States in the first four centuries A.D. As with the expansion of Christianity, the new converts are unlikely to have understood the religion in the same way as its founders. Nonetheless, its impact was profound. In a mutated form, it may well have given impetus to the rise of Cahokia.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN BOTTOM
Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known collectively as “Mississippian” cultures, these societies arose several centuries after the decline of the Hopewell culture, and probably were its distant descendants. At any one time a few larger polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia, biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an anomaly: the greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city north of the Río Grande. Five times or more bigger than any other Mississippian polity, Cahokia’s population of at least fifteen thousand made it comparable in size to London, but on a landmass without Paris, Córdoba, or Rome.
I call Cahokia a city so as to have a stick to beat it with, but it was not a city in any modern sense. A city provides goods and services for its surrounding area, exchanging food from the countryside for the products of its sophisticated craftspeople. By definition, its inhabitants are urban—they aren’t farmers. Cahokia, however, was a huge collection of farmers packed cheek by jowl. It had few specialized craftworkers and no middle-class merchants. On reflection, Cahokia’s dissimilarity to other cities is not surprising; having never seen a city, its citizens had to invent every aspect of urban life for themselves.
Despite the nineteenth-century fascination with the mounds, archaeologists did not begin to examine Cahokia thoroughly until the 1960s. Since then studies have gushed from the presses. By and large, they have only confirmed Cahokia’s status as a statistical outlier. Cahokia sat on the eastern side of the American Bottom. Most of the area has clayey soil that is hard to till and prone to floods. Cahokia was located next to the largest stretch of good farmland in the entire American Bottom. At its far edge, a forest of oak and hickory topped a line of bluffs. The area was little settled until as late as 600 A.D., when people trickled in and formed small villages, groups of a few hundred who planted gardens and boated up and down the Mississippi to other villages. As the millennium approached, the American Bottom had a resident population of several thousand. Then, without much apparent warning, there was, according to the archaeologist Timothy R. Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, what has been called a “Big Bang”—a few decades of tumultuous change.
Cahokia’s mounds emerged from the Big Bang, along with the East St. Louis mound complex a mile away (the second biggest, after Cahokia, though now mostly destroyed) and the St. Louis mounds just across the Mississippi (the fourth biggest). Monks Mound was the first and most grandiose of the construction projects. Its core is a slab of clay about 900 feet long, 650 feet wide, and more than 20 feet tall. From an engineering standpoint, clay should never be selected as the bearing material for a big earthen monument. Clay readily absorbs water, expanding as it does. The American Bottom clay, known as smectite clay, is especially prone to swelling: its volume can increase by a factor of eight. Drying, it shrinks back to its original dimensions. Over time the heaving will destroy whatever is built on top of it. The Cahokians’ solution to this problem was discovered mainly by Woods, the University of Kansas archaeologist and geographer, who has spent two decades excavating Monks Mound.
(Illustration Credit 8.3)
These artistic reconstructions of Cahokia from the site museum suggest the great scale of the city, but should not be taken as precisely accurate—they seem, for instance, to show the mounds covered with grass (not only is there no evidence that the mounds were covered with foliage, lawn grass is a European species that came to the Americas after Columbus).
(Illustration Credit 8.4)
To minimize instability, he told me, the Cahokians kept the slab at a constant moisture level: wet but not too wet. Moistening the clay was easy—capillary action will draw up water from the floodplain, which has a high water table. The trick is to stop evaporation from drying out the top. 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. The sand acts as a shield for the slab. Water rises through the clay to meet it, but cannot proceed further because the sand is too loose for further capillary action. Nor can the water evaporate; the clay layers atop the sand press down and prevent air from coming in. In addition, the sand lets rainfall drain away from the mound, preventing it from swelling too much. The final result covered almost fifteen acres and was the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out of unsuitable material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years.
Because the slab had to stay moist, it must have been built and covered quickly, a task requiring a big workforce. Evidence suggests that people moved from miles around to the American Bottom to be part of the project. If the ideas of Pauketat, the University of Illinois archaeologist, are correct, the immigrants probably came to regret their decision to move. To his way of thinking, the Big Bang occurred after a single ambitious person seized power, perhaps in a coup. Although his reign may have begun idealistically, Cahokia quickly became an autocracy; in an Ozymandiac extension of his ego, the supreme leader set in motion the construction projects. Loyalists forced immigrants to join the labor squads, maintaining control with the occasional massacre. Burials show the growing power of the elite: in a small mound half a mile south of Monks Mound, archaeologists in the late 1960s uncovered six high-status people interred with shell beads, copper ornaments, mica artworks—and the sacrificed bodies of more than a hundred retainers. Among them were fifty young women who had been buried alive.
Woods disagrees with what he calls the “proto-Stalinist work camp” scenario. Nobody was forced to erect Monks Mound, he says. Despite the intermittent displays of coercion, he says, Cahokians put it up “because they wanted to.” They “were proud to be part of these symbols of community identity.” Monks Mound and its fellows were, in part, a shout-out to the world—Look at us! We’re doing something different! It was also the construction of a landscape of sacred power, built in an atmosphere of ecstatic religious celebration. The American Bottom, in this scenario, was the site of one of the world’s most spectacular tent revivals. Equally important, Woods says, the mound city was in large part an outgrowth of the community’s previous adoption of maize.
Before Cahokia’s rise, people were slowly hunting the local deer and bison populations to extinction. The crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex could not readily make up the difference. Among other problems, most had small seeds—imagine trying to feed a family on sesame seeds, and you have some idea of what it would have been like to subsist on maygrass. Maize had been available since the first century B.C. (It would have arrived sooner, but Indians had to breed landraces that could tolerate the cooler weather, shorter growing seasons, and longer summer days of th
e north.) The Hopewell, however, almost ignored it. Somewhere around 800 A.D. their hungry successors took another look at the crop and liked what they saw. The American Bottom, with its plenitude of easily cleared, maize-suitable land, was one of the best places to grow it for a considerable distance. The newcomers needed to store their harvests for the winter, a task most efficiently accomplished with a communal granary. The granary needed to be supervised—an invitation to develop centralized power. Growth happened fast and may well have been hurried along by a charismatic leader, Woods said, but something like Cahokia probably would have happened anyway.
(Map credit 8.2)
Maize also played a role in the city’s disintegration. Cahokia represented the first time Indians north of the Río Grande had tried to feed and shelter fifteen thousand people in one place, and they made beginner’s mistakes. To obtain fuel and construction material and to grow food, they cleared trees and vegetation from the bluffs to the east and planted every inch of arable land. Because the city’s numbers kept increasing, the forest could not return. Instead people kept moving further out to get timber, which then had to be carried considerable distances. Having no beasts of burden, the Cahokians themselves had to do all the carrying. Meanwhile, Woods told me, the city began outstripping its water supply, a “somewhat wimpy” tributary called Canteen Creek. To solve both of these problems at once, the Cahokians apparently changed its course, which had consequences that they cannot have anticipated.
Nowadays Cahokia Creek, which flows from the north, and Canteen Creek, which flows from the east, join together at a point about a quarter mile northeast of Monks Mound. On its way to the Mississippi, the combined river then wanders, quite conveniently, within two hundred yards of the central plaza. Originally, though, the smaller Canteen Creek alone occupied that channel. Cahokia Creek drained into a lake to the northwest, then went straight to the Mississippi, bypassing Cahokia altogether. Sometime between 1100 and 1200 A.D., according to Woods’s as-yet unpublished research, Cahokia Creek split in two. One fork continued as before, but the second, larger fork dumped into Canteen Creek. The combined river provided much more water to the city—it was about seventy feet wide. And it also let woodcutters upstream send logs almost to Monks Mound. A natural inference, to Woods’s way of thinking, is that the city, in a major public works project, “intentionally diverted” Cahokia Creek.