Opinion

America’s lost jewel

It is a lost city of the plains, a pyramid-studded metropolis on the Mississippi that stood for more than a century, a place of culture, sport and worship.

Yet many Americans know little of Cahokia — or the people that lived there 500 years before the arrival of European explorers to the New World. While popular culture focuses on the Aztecs and Maya, continuing archaeological work shows that Cahokia was an ancient wonder in its own right, the centerpiece of a still poorly understood American Indian nation.

The reasons why the city was even built remain mysterious, though researchers suggest it was in commemoration of an astonishing astronomical event: A supernova in the year 1054, an exploding star visible even during the day.

Native builders gathered by the Mississippi, near the location of modern St. Louis, to construct the city from scratch. They erected an 100-foot-high earthen pyramid — the third largest in the New World — amidst five square miles of public plazas and residential neighborhoods. Ten to twenty thousand people lived in Cahokia, making it the largest population center north of Mexico until 1785, when the temporary capital of a young United States, New York, exceeded that size. And like New York, immigrants poured into Cahokia.

Archaeologists believe that Cahokians mixed church and state in unusual and unprecedented ways. Priests and rulers oversaw great Thanksgiving-style feasts, when thousands were fed at once on deer haunches, prairie chickens, catfish, pumpkin soups and roasted corn. They hosted huge sporting spectacles, playing Cahokia’s new official sport of “chunkey,” which involved two teams throwing sticks at a rolling stone. And they sacrificed human beings.

At Cahokia, human sacrifice had been a great spectacle, much like it was among the Aztecs and Maya in Mexico. Young women, perhaps captives or immigrants, were Cahokia’s usual victims. In one instance, discovered in the late 1960s by archaeologists digging into what they knew as “Mound 72,” a total of 53 women were found carefully laid into a large wooden burial vault, apparently all poisoned or strangled to death at the same time. In another bizarre ritual killing sometime late in the 11th century, 39 men and women were clubbed in the head, falling into an open trench. Several did not die instantly, the diggers determined, their fingers having dug into the pit bottom in their final moments.

Such strange practices happened infrequently, when the stars were in proper alignment. And archaeologists suspect that it was done not out of malice but in honor of a great Corn Goddess. As in Mexico, corn was believed to have been given to people by this deity, from whose body the crop sprouted. Her carved stone idols have been found in Cahokia’s temples, showing the mythical figure intertwined with serpents and vines, holding corn stalks, and guarding baskets containing the bones of ancestors. The Corn Goddess occupied the pinnacle of Cahokia’s pantheon, and their sacrifice of women seems to have been a ritual reenactment of her own supernatural sacrifice.

Ordinary people may not have understood all of this any more than we can easily grasp its significance today. Most Cahokians were simple farmers, as Midwestern Indians had been for at least 200 years prior. They grew corn, squash and sunflowers. They cleared the land and filled their storehouses with surplus foodstuffs used by Cahokians to host visiting dignitaries or to feed the pilgrims and local workers who came to the city to experience its wonders.

The locals probably dressed simply, men in breechcloths and plain woven shirts and women in simple dresses. But the elites would have been elaborately costumed in colorfully dyed fabric smocks over tanned hide undergarments and under feathered capes and beaded sashes. Necklaces, bracelets, anklets of white shell beads denoted their high status, as did their hats and hairdos. Elite women’s hair would have been braided or tied up into multiple hair buns. In their widely stretched earlobes would have been circular earspools covered in shiney copper.

Arms, legs, and faces, particularly about the eyes and mouths, would have been tattooed with abstract geometric designs. Priests and leaders would have worn pillbox hats or large headdresses of feathers, animal skins, and beads arranged around embossed copper centerpieces, the insignia of their clans or ancestors.

While at Cahokia, people played chunkey, smoked strong tobacco, prayed to gods, and worked on one of the region’s 200 earthen pyramids. When they returned home, they might take a piece of the place along with them. Archaeologists have found many things, especially pottery originally made at Cahokia, in villages as distant as Minnesota in the north to Louisiana in the south.

So why do so few people today appreciate Cahokia? Perhaps because ancient America’s experiment in urbanism didn’t last long. Just a century after it was founded, the city began to crumble. Farming villages began to disappear as ordinary people, perhaps disillusioned with the realities of the place, started to leave. By 1400, the city was abandoned and forgotten, even by its own descendants. When Lewis and Clark ventured up the Missouri River in 1803, the great Midwestern and Plains tribes whose ancestors had built Cahokia — the Omaha, Quapaw, Osage and Pawnee tribes, among others — told no stories of their city. And so Cahokia was lost in history, still overlooked by those who think of pre-Columbian American Indians only as simple hunters and horticulturalists.

Cahokia’s ruins are still there, five miles east of modern-day St. Louis, today recognized by the UN as a World Heritage Site. But only the city center is preserved, owned by the state of Illinois, a great ancient American Indian city desperately in need of federal recognition as a National Monument. These great tribes deserve to have their ancient city placed back on our national map.

Timothy R. Pauketat is the author of “Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi” (Viking), out now.