Located twelve miles east of St. Louis in the American Bottom, Cahokia was the largest American city north of Mexico. With a peak population of 20,000 or more, it was the center of the Mississippian culture that dominated the greater Mississippi Valley from about A.D. 1000 to 1400. Around A.D. 800 approximately 1,000 people were living around Cahokia in small villages, farming the rich bottomlands. Then in A.D. 1050, something big happened. The population exploded and every aspect of life got more complex. In downtown Cahokia they built a series of elaborate mounds around a grand central plaza dominated by the 100-foot tall Monk’s Mound. The city quickly grew to cover 4,000 acres with dozens of mounds and thousands of homes.
In this new study, Sarah Baires, an archaeologist at Eastern Connecticut State University who received her doctorate from the University of Illinois, argues that the moving force behind Cahokia’s sudden rise was a new and novel religion that attracted immigrants from near and far. She contends that Cahokia was a planned city built for economic and political purposes as well as a spiritual place relating to ancestors, gods, and “the cosmos through the land.”
Much of the evidence in this book comes from recent excavations conducted by Baires and her associates at the University of Illinois on the newly discovered Rattlesnake Causeway and associated ridge-top mortuary mounds located along the site axes. Reexamination of previously excavated mounds, particularly the Wilson Mound, excavated in 1954, complements the new research. These mounds were built for burials and are characterized by a pointed, or ridged, top, not unlike the hip roofs of Cahokia houses. As such they are unfit as platforms for elite residences, unlike most Mississippian mounds. They are unique to greater Cahokia and make up seventeen of the approximately 200 mounds in the area.
Baires argues that the new Cahokia religion centers on a built landscape that encompasses massive earth structures as well as water-filled barrow pits in the wet environment of the flood plain. The elaborate mortuary mounds are where the people brought their dead, their pottery and projectile points, and their ways of being. Baires makes a good case for her theory of Cahokia. She looks at the great city and its religion in a different way that will aid future studies while promoting new perspectives.
