Quotes About Cahokia

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.

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.

Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods, Cahokia's maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.

In the past, they had shaped the landscape mainly with fire; the ax came out only for garden plots of marshelder and little barley. As maize swept in, Indians burned and cleared thousands of acres of land, mainly in river valleys. As in Cahokia, floods and mudslides rewarded them.

To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia's day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.

A catastrophic earthquake razed Cahokia in the beginning of the thirteenth century, knocking down the entire western side of Monks Mound.

At its height, Cahokia had a population in excess of ten thousand, with at least twenty or thirty thousand more in the outlying towns and farming settlements that ranged for fifty miles in every direction.

Cahokia, ancient America's one true city north of Mexico—as large in its day as London—and the political capital of a most unusual Indian nation.

Burials in Cahokia could be astonishingly elaborate. In one, a man was buried on a bed of twenty thousand beads of shell. Nearby three people were buried at teh same time along with eight hundred arrowheads and a host of other objects. These were probably close relatives, sacrifieced at the death of the great man. Also nearby, more than fifty women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three were interred, evidently strangled as part of a funeral ceremony.