The consolidation of this symbolism into a rural cult marks the expropriation of the cosmos as part of the increasing power of the Cahokian rulers.

The fascinating story of a lost city and an unprecedented American civilization located in modern day Illinois near St. Louis While Mayan and Aztec civilizations are widely known and documented, relatively few people are familiar with the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico-a site that expert Timothy Pauketat brings vividly to life in this groundbreaking book. Almost a thousand years ago, a city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Built around a sprawling central plaza and known as Cahokia, the site has drawn the attention of generations of archaeologists, whose work produced evidence of complex celestial timepieces, feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of human sacrifice. Drawing on these fascinating finds, Cahokia presents a lively and astonishing narrative of prehistoric America.

In this first comprehensive analysis of several recently uncovered sites in the American Bottom region, Mehrer focuses on household archaeology to shed light on the daily lives of the Mississippian people. He examines the objects of daily use--domestic and ceremonial buildings, storage and processing pits, mundane and exotic artifacts--to reconstruct the framework of everyday life and to show how the routines of early native people changed with time. New findings reveal the changing roles of households in their communities, exposing a social order more complex than previously thought. Mehrer examines seven sites in the American Bottom region--the Robert Schneider, BBB Motor, Turner-DeManger, Florence Street, Julien, Range, and Carbon Dioxide sites--and integrates his findings with new information from the large Cahokia mound center. Analyzing patterns of debris distribution, pit morphology and arrangement, and household organization, he reveals much about the social and cultural developments in the region. While illuminating the daily lives of Cahokians, Mehrer develops an analytical approach to archaeological site data that can be applied in other parts of the world. The Cahokia region is of special interest because the Cahokia site is the largest mound center in North America and because the Mississippian society there rose and fell long before Europeans arrived. Although archaeologists have previously focused on Cahokia's elite population, until now little has been known about its rural residents.

About one thousand years ago, Native Americans built hundreds of earthen platform mounds, plazas, residential areas, and other types of monuments in the vicinity of present-day St. Louis. This sprawling complex, known to archaeologists as Cahokia, was the dominant cultural, ceremonial, and trade center north of Mexico for centuries. This stimulating collection of essays casts new light on the remarkable accomplishments of Cahokia.

First published in 1998 by Smithsonian Institution Press, The Cahokia Chiefdom surveys one of North America's great archaeological sites that includes more than one hundred earthen mounds constructed between the 11th and 14th centuries. Milner paints a vivid picture of the site and its environs while arguing that the regional system was not as powerful and all-encompassing as commonly thought, but was instead a collection of semi-autonomous districts with far fewer people than previously assumed. This detailed study of Cahokia research history documents environmental conditions that affected prehistoric peoples, such as river channels, flooding, and plant and animal life. In addition, he summarizes evidence of the region's food, the remains of houses and other buildings, stone tools, ceramics, crafts, population figures, the distribution of power, and labor and economics, including exchange with other societies. The author attributes the region's growth to a complex interplay of cultural, demographic, and environmental factors, including the advantages of its location and rich resources, and its decline to a reorganization of social relations across the region that involved the emergence of competing centers. This reprint edition features a new preface by the author updating archaeological evidence through 2005.

Using a wealth of archaeological evidence, this book outlines the development of Mississippian civilization.

An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview offarming and food practices at Cahokia Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance. This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.