Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World

"This book defines the cutting edge of Mississippian research. The new vision of Cahokia it presents is both compelling and provocative."-Vincas P. Steponaitis, University of North Carolina. "A volume of outstanding significance."-Melvin L. Fowler, University of Wisconsin. About one thousand years ago, Native Americans built hundreds of earthen platform mounds, plazas, residential areas, and other types of monuments in the vicinity of present-day St. Louis. This sprawling complex, known to archaeologists as Cahokia, was the dominant cultural, ceremonial, and trade center north of Mexico for centuries. This stimulating collection of essays casts new light on the remarkable accomplishment of Cahokia. The nine contributors explore a wide range of topics-religion, trade, the nature of local and regional ideologies, social organization, subsistence, mound construction, and the longstanding question of Cahokia's relationship to later Mississippian chiefdoms across the Southeast. Cahokia emerges from this book as a significant focal point of eastern native history. It was prominently situated at the center of a vast regional network that was simultaneously ideological, religious, and economic-an intricate system of thought, ritual, and power whose effects were felt for centuries. Timothy R. Pauketat, an associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is the author of The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America. Thomas E. Emerson is director of the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program, Department of Anthropology, at the University of Illinois. He is editor, with R. Barry Lewis, of Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest.