Cahokia (fl. 1050-1250) was the largest North American city north of Mexico in 1100. It was as large as Paris or London in its day, or New York in the late 1700s. It had 15,000 to 40,000 people and stood across the Mississippi River from where St Louis now stands. It arose almost overnight, five times bigger than anything for thousands of kilometres – and then suddenly it fell 200 years later.
Thomas Jefferson knew about it, yet it was little known or studied till the 1960s when the US government dug up part of it up to build an interstate highway. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, one with a billboard for Joe’s Carpet King in the middle of it (as of 2011).
Monks Mound (pictured) is the main thing left. It has stood for a thousand years – yet is built on clay! In a flood plain. But it was built by the Mound Builders, who by then had been building mounds for 4,500 years.
The Mound Builders: Eastern North America once had tens of thousands of mounds, some of them shaped like animals. Most of them have been destroyed by White Americans, but when Whites first saw them they thought they had been built by people from Scandinavia or China or Phoenicia or Israel or Atlantis or even Wales. Jefferson had one on his property and studied it. He said the Mound Builders were Native American.
From what they left inside the mounds we know that at least some of them had class-based societies, practised human sacrifice, smoked a powerful, hallucinogenic form of tobacco and traded with all parts of eastern North America.
Eastern Agricultural Complex: By about -1800 they had started to grow
- chestnuts,
- hickory nuts,
- marshelder (Iva annua),
- knotweed (Polygonum erectum),
- sunflowers (Helianthus annuus),
- maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana),
- little barley (Hordeum pusillum),
- squash (Cucurbita pepo)
and so on. Whites see some of these as weeds.
After -200, the Three Sisters arrived from Mexico: maize, beans and (a different kind of) squash.
Maize at first did not grow well north of Mexico, but by 800 the Mound Builders had created a new sort that did. Mound Builder maize grew so well that from 1100 to 1300 it led to widespread flooding because so many trees had been cut down to grow it. After 1600, it became the main food of Whites.
Maize was the base on which Cahokia grew. But it sprang up so suddenly that there was more to it than that. Maybe a religion or powerful leader drove it. Since Cahokia left no writings, we can only guess.
Cahokia was not a pretty world: in one mound 50 young women were buried alive.
The increase in flooding may have undermined Cahokia’s religious leaders. A wall was built separating the inner part of the city. It cut right through commoners’ houses.
In the 1200s an earthquake and a flood destroyed the city. It was rebuilt, but then came civil war. By 1350 Cahokia was nearly empty.
Of the Native Americans that Whites know about, Cahokians were most like the Natchez.
Thanks to George Ryder for suggesting this post and for his help with it.
– Abagond, 2015.
Source: Mainly “1491” (2011) by Charles C. Mann, National Geographic (January 2011), “The Human Web” (2003) by J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill.
See also:
- The lies you were taught about Native Americans
- Natchez
- Teotihuacan
- King Corn
- Vine Deloria, Jr: Conquest Masquerading as Law
- Eastern Woodlands:
- Tainos
- Whites (Anglo Americans)
579
Gee, we are thanking someone who is already banned for their help with the post. Feels strange reading this now.
Just wondering, do we know much more about Cahokian society and culture? For example, what caused the civil war?
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Reblogged this on 1listenerblog.
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George Ryder was banned?
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@Kartoffel,
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/comment-policy/#comment-275182)
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Fascinating. Is that a winged man shown in the artifact?
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Wow, So Ryder finally got the boot. Good riddence
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^He was becoming obsessed with his battles with Sharina. I think he really came to enjoy those fights somehow. I’m not sure why.
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Awesome, informative article!
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@King
While I the blunt of it was me, he was becoming increasingly abusive to other commenters.
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Ok so were they of African origin or Hispanic? Maybe that is an odd question. There seems to be very little knowledge of their culture.
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Sharina, it is doubtful that were of either African or Hispanic origin as this predates the arrival of either. 😐
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^^^Thanks Jefe. I realized that a bit late though. 😦
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@ Jefe
It is hard to tell what caused the civil war since there are no written records.
Religious ceremonies used to take place on the top of Monks Mound where it was hard for commoners to see or hear what was going on. Later they took place on a lower platform with good acoustics. Add to that the flood and earthquake and how the wall was built right through commoners’s houses, and it sounds like they had serious issues with class and religion.
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@ Jefe
Jefferson regarded the Cahokians as an extinct people. Some say they were Natchez. No one knows what language they spoke, so we cannot say for sure that they were Natchez, but of the Native Americans that Whites saw when they arrived in that part of North America 300 or so years later, the Cahokians would have been most like the Natchez in both culture and the way their society was ordered.
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@ King
That man shown in the artefact is dressed as a hawk.
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@ abagond
So he is Horus. Strange how often he shows up all around the world. And often in cultures that are building their own variety of pyramid…
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“He was becoming obsessed with his battles with Sharina. I think he really came to enjoy those fights somehow. I’m not sure why.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I suspect Matari (and perhaps others) stopped posting here as a form of protest against Abagond’s past tolerance of George’s asinine nonsense.
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Native American Council Offers Amnesty to 240 Million Undocumented Whites
At a meeting on Friday in Taos, New Mexico, Native American leaders weighed a handful of proposals about the future of the United State’s large, illegal European population. After a long debate, NANC decided to extend a road to citizenship for those without criminal records or contagious diseases.
http://cityworldnews.cohttp://cityworldnews.com/native-american-amnesty/m/native-american-amnesty/
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@Just Me
No need to suspect. That is the very reason he left. I just wish I could remember the exact thread.
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Just saw an article about a huge archaeological find in Arkansas City, Kansas of an Indigenous city that rivals Cahokia in size. The city, known as Etzanoa has been shrouded in mystery for over 400 years. Located at the crossing of the Walnut and Arkansas rivers, Etzanoa was the stronghold of the Wichita people.
According to Donald Blakeslee, an anthropologist and archaeologist at Wichita State University, the Wichita people were:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/mcclatchys-america/article145026439.html
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@ Abagond
Now that you have a post on the Natchez, maybe include a link to it here?
@ Afrofem
That’s terrific news, especially considering how few of the mounds survived the European invasion. Hopefully we will learn much more about the Mound Builders’ civilization through this discovery.
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@ Solitaire
Yes! Thanks.
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@ Afrofem
Thanks. When I was 11 I wondered why there was no city there.
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@Abagond
Seems like the Spanish did their usual scorched earth destruction with a massive dose of smallpox as a chaser.
So much history, knowledge and ways of looking at the world ——- lost.
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