Cahokia

by Young, Biloine Whiting

• ISBN13: 9780252068218
• ISBN10: 0252068211
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Five centuries before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, indigenous North Americans had already built a vast urban center on the banks of the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. This is the story of North America's largest archaeological site, told through the lives, personalities, and conflicts of the men and women who excavated and studied it. Cahokia, a precisely planned community with a fortified central city and surrounding suburbs, was designed as a reflection of the Cahokian's concept of the cosmos. At its height the metropolis had twenty thousand inhabitants in the city center with another ten thousand in the outskirts. Its centerpiece, Monk's Mound, ten stories tall, is the largest pre-Columbian structure in North America, with a base circumference larger than that of either the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Melvin Fowler, the "dean" of Cahokia archaeologists, and Biloine Whiting Young tell an engrossing story of the struggle to protect the site from the encroachment of interstate highways and urban sprawl. Now identified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and protected by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Cahokia serves as a reminder that the indigenous North Americans had a past of complexity and great achievement.

Author Biography

Melvin L. Fowler is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
The Making of a Cahokia Archaeologist	p. 1
The Illinois Archaeological Survey and the Prehistory of Cahokia	p. 13
Early Investigations into the Great Mounds	p. 23
The Destruction of the Powell and Murdock Mounds	p. 40
The Hopewellian Ceramic Conference and Digging the Modoc Rock Shelter	p. 50
Chaos and Confusion at Cahokia	p. 57
The 1960s Highway Salvage Program Begins	p. 73
The Emerging Picture of a Complex Cahokia	p. 96
The Excavation of Mound 72	p. 123
Excavations on Monks Mound	p. 154
New Sequential Ceramic Phases Defined	p. 165
The Second Highway Salvage Project	p. 174
The Struggle to Build a New Cahokia Museum	p. 194
The Slumping of Monks Mound and Discovery of the Grand Plaza	p. 207
Woodhenges Revisited	p. 216
The Physical Landscape of Cahokia	p. 244
The Spiritual Landscape of Cahokia	p. 264
Cahokia's Engineers and Builders	p. 274
The Outposts of Cahokia	p. 287
The Abandonment of Cahokia	p. 310
Cahokia's Place in the Pre-Conquest World	p. 316
Epilogue	p. 325
Glossary	p. 329
References Cited and Other Readings	p. 333
Index	p. 355
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