North America Before the European Invasions by Alice Beck Kehoe

Author:Alice Beck Kehoe
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Cahokia is bigger by far than any other archaeological site north of central Mexico. It filled the Mississippi River floodplain at what is now St. Louis with well over one hundred monumental mounds and thousands of homesteads on raised foundations. Urban planning is obvious at Cahokia, with the plazas, platform mounds, and commoner residences laid out oriented toward the cardinal directions. Conical mounds, a few on the terraces of massive Monks Mound, and great circles of huge wooden posts balance the angularity of the overall layout, and some small oval mounds lie southeast–northwest, possibly solstice oriented. Cahokia’s urban plan is Mesoamerican, based on rectangular plazas bounded by platform mounds elevating temples and elite residences; its homesteads also fall within a common Mesoamerican plan of three structures around a courtyard, a basic plan that persisted into the historic period among the Creeks (Muskokee), who customarily erected three structures, called the man’s house, the woman’s house, and the storage house. During the eleventh-century height of Cahokian urban growth, neighborhood clusters of small rectangular houses replaced courtyard homesteads in the center of the city. No other pre-European site in the United States is anywhere as large as Cahokia (an estimated five square miles [twelve square kilometers] without including present-day St. Louis on the opposite side of the river), none other can have held its population (fifteen thousand is a reasonable figure), and no other exhibits such an overarching design. Erection of such a well-thought-out city at the nexus of the midcontinent waterways and the river highway to the Gulf of Mexico was a political act.

Monks Mound at the center of Cahokia (now Cahokia Mounds State Park at Collinsville, Illinois) was the third-largest structure in the Americas before the modern era. (Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Sun is the largest, Cholula’s manmade Mountain pyramid second. Egypt’s Gizeh pyramids are smaller and were not platforms.) Monks Mound, so called because in the nineteenth century a community of Trappist monks built their house and gardens on part of it, is slightly over one thousand feet (316 meters) long north–south, nearly eight hundred feet (241 meters) wide east–west, and a bit over one hundred feet (thirty meters) high: even the top, fourth, terrace platform is bigger than a football field. Excavations on the top terrace revealed a great timber building more than 135 feet (forty-five meters) wide, its full extent never determined due to lack of further archaeological investigation. The Great Plaza stretching south from Monks Mound is nine hundred feet long by 1,200 feet wide (three hundred by four hundred meters), made level by infilling and capping the original ground with up to thirty inches (seventy-five centimeters) of selected soil. To prevent the hulking Monks Mound from slumping, its knowledgeable engineers ordered layers of different types of earth and internal drains. Other mounds at Cahokia show sequences of smaller mounds and colored clay caps, often a pair of round and flat-topped mounds on a low platform eventually coalesced into one by the later additions. Satellite centers, suburban villages, and hamlets and farms filled the floodplain.

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