The US' lost, ancient megacity

[DGUtley]

In the ancient Mississippian settlement of Cahokia, vast social events – not trade or the economy – were the founding principle.

Pity the event planners tasked with managing Cahokia's wildest parties. A thousand years ago, the Mississippian settlement – on a site near the modern US city of St Louis, Missouri – was renowned for bashes that went on for days. Throngs jostled for space on massive plazas. Buzzy, caffeinated drinks passed from hand to hand. Crowds shouted bets as athletes hurled spears and stones. And Cahokians feasted with abandon: burrowing into their ancient waste pits, archaeologists have counted 2,000 deer carcasses from a single, blowout event. The logistics must have been staggering. Things are quieter these days at Cahokia, now a placid Unesco site.

But towering, earthen mounds there hint at the legacy of the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. A cosmopolitan whir of language, art and spiritual ferment, Cahokia's population may have swelled to 30,000 people at its 1050 AD peak, making it larger, at the time, than Paris.

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http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/2021...=pocket-newtab

[MMC]

This historic park lies in south-western Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville.^[4] The park covers 2,200 acres (890 ha), or about 3.5 square miles (9 km²), and contains about 80 mounds, but the ancient city was much larger. At its apex around 1100 CE, the city covered about 6 square miles (16 km²) and included about 120 manmade earthen mounds in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions.^[5] At the apex of its population, Cahokia may have briefly exceeded contemporaneous London, which at that time was approximately 14,000–18,000


Historian Daniel Richter notes that the apex of the city occurred during the Medieval Warming Period. This period appears to have fostered an agricultural revolution in upper North America, as the three-fold crops of maize, beans (legumes), and gourds (squash) were developed and adapted or bred to the temperate climates of the north from their origins in Mesoamerica. Richter also notes that Cahokia's advanced development coincided with the development in the Southwest of the Chaco Canyon society, which also produced large-scale works in an apparent socially stratified society. The decline of the city coincides with the Little Ice Age, although by then, the three-fold agriculture remained well-established throughout temperate North America.





Mound 72[edit]

Main article: Mound 72

Mound 72

During excavation of Mound 72, a ridge-top burial mound south of main urban precinct, archaeologists found the remains of a man in his 40s who was probably an important Cahokian ruler. The man was buried on a bed of more than 20,000 marine-shell disc beads arranged in the shape of a falcon,^[49] with the bird's head appearing beneath and beside the man's head, and its wings and tail beneath his arms and legs.
The falcon warrior or "birdman" is a common motif in Mississippian culture. This burial clearly had powerful iconographic significance. In addition, a cache of sophisticated, finely worked arrowheads in a variety of different styles and materials was found near the grave of this important man. Separated into four types, each from a different geographical region, the arrowheads demonstrated Cahokia's extensive trade links in North America.



Archeologists recovered more than 250 other skeletons from Mound 72. Scholars believe almost 62% of these were sacrificial victims, based on signs of ritual execution, method of burial, and other factors.


Cahokia - Wikipedia



Almond Joy has Nuts.....Mounds dont!

[Chris]

@Dave, thanks for finding this article. I'd been reading it but lost it to a Windows update.

Here is the point that got my attention:

...It's what Cahokia didn't have that's startling, writes Annalee Newitz in their recent book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. The massive city lacked a permanent marketplace, confounding old assumptions that trade is the organising principle behind all urbanisation.

"Cahokia was really a cultural centre rather than a trade centre. It still boggles my mind. I keep wondering 'Where were they trading? Who was making money?'," Newitz said. "The answer is they weren't. That wasn't why they built the space."

Newitz isn't alone in their surprise. Assumptions that commerce is the key to urban life long shaped a Western view of the past, explains archaeologist Timothy Pauketat, who has studied Cahokia for decades.

"It's definitely a bias that influenced earlier archaeologists," he said. When excavating cities in Mesopotamia, researchers found evidence that trade was the organising principle behind their development, then turned the same lens on ancient cities across the globe. "People thought that this must be the basis for all early cities. It's led to generations of looking for that kind of thing everywhere," Pauketat said.

They didn't find it in Cahokia, which Pauketat believes may instead have been conceived as a place to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead. For many cultures with roots in ancient Cahokia, "water is this barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead," Pauketat said. Sprawling across a landscape that combines solid earth with patches of swamp, Cahokia may have served as a kind of spiritual crossroads....

[Standing Wolf]

Sort of a cross between Sedona and Burning Man, but with human sacrifices.

[DGUtley]

The Ohio Mounds have always fascinated me.

https://www.tripsavvy.com/ohios-fasc...-mounds-753018


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[MMC]

One of the major problems that large centers like Cahokia faced was keeping a steady supply of food. A related problem was waste disposal for the dense population, and Cahokia became unhealthy from polluted waterways. Because it was such an unhealthy place to live, Snow believes that the town had to rely on social and political attractions to bring in a steady supply of new immigrants; otherwise, the town's death rate would have caused it to be abandoned earlier.<sup>[20]


The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.[29][30] Scholars have proposed environmental factors, such as environmental degradation through overhunting, deforestation[31] and pollution,[32] and climatic changes, such as increased flooding[33] and droughts,[34][35] as explanations for abandonment of the site.[29] Political and economic problems may also have been responsible for the site's decline.[36] It is likely that social and environmental factors combined to produce the conditions that led people to decide to leave Cahokia.[37][35]



Another possible cause is invasion by outside peoples, though the only evidence of warfare found are the defensive wooden stockade and watchtowers that enclosed Cahokia's main ceremonial precinct. There is no other evidence for warfare, so the palisade may have been more for ritual or formal separation than for military purposes. Diseases transmitted among the large, dense urban population are another possible cause of decline. Many theories since the late 20th century propose conquest-induced political collapse as the primary reason for Cahokia's abandonment.[38]




Together with these factors, researchers found evidence in 2015 of major floods at Cahokia, so severe as to flood dwelling places. Analysis of sediment from beneath Horseshoe Lake has revealed that two major floods occurred in the period of settlement at Cahokia, in roughly 1100–1260 and 1340–1460.....snip~</sup>

[Mister D]

@Dave, thanks for finding this article. I'd been reading it but lost it to a Windows update.

Here is the point that got my attention:

As I understand it, there are several major theories regarding urbanization. One emphasizes trade, one religion and sacred space and the third competition between clans in public works (e.g. the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia). I don't see why they cannot all be true to one degree or another. After all, there is some overlap.

[Chris]

As I understand it, there are several major theories regarding urbanization. One emphasizes trade, one religion and sacred space and the third competition between clans in public works (e.g. the irrigation canals of ancient Mesopotamia). I don't see why they cannot all be true to one degree or another. After all, there is some overlap.

I'd agree, all three can be involved to different degrees. Cahokia seems to be an instance where religion played the largest part. Of course, trade would have been required to sustain it. Polynesia island tribes, iirc, lacked trade though they did exchange things as gifts among islands. James C. Scott, in his Against the Grain. for example, emphasizes the third, competitive or controlling aspect, the state emerging from efforts to protect an area of agriculture with military and beancounters to control it.