Timothy R. Pauketat

The Book Report: Where today sits St. Louis, Missouri, there once sat a huge Native American city we call Cahokia, absent any other name for it, relating it to a creek that flows through the five-square-mile extent of the known city and suburbs. There are Indian mounds galore here, and there even is a state park over on the Illinois side of the river. Serious archaeology has been done mostly in front of the bulldozers and the plows of farmers, developers, and the highway builders. Pauketat show more is one of the region's many dirt archaeologists, the guys who go out and trench interesting sites and keep uber-meticulous notes and drawings and samples of stuff. (GOD doesn't that sound like a painful bore?) Thanks to him and his colleagues, we now know that some sort of major urbanization kick hit the area in 1054 and ended in tears about 1250. Why? (On both counts.) Who? What the hell? Those are the questions raised by the archeology, and treated in concise chapters in this book.

My Review: I am not joking when I say concise. This entire book comes in at 170pp of author's text, plus 15pp of notes and an index. Not a challenging read, right? Wrong. The information conveyed in these pages, with about the expected level of grace from an academic writing about his pernickety, obsessive specialty, is rich and deep. I found myself taking week-long pauses at times, not "oh god what a slog" pauses but "...wait...what...no...wait..." pauses while my inner Bill and Ted tried to work out the IMMENSE and IMPORTANT implications of what I was learning.

Immense indeed. Native Americans are all-too-frequently hagiogrpahized as natural-world-lovin' harmony seekers. Oh really? Explain then, if you please, the six separate sites with as many as seventy sacrificed women buried in the trenches in front of which they were clubbed to death in this MATRILINEAL society? In ranks, meaning the next row stood there while the first row was clubbed to death. Why did the different-genetic-stock neighborhoods outlying Cahokia show the signs of poor diet and overwork that one expects to see in the lower classes, and that are absent from the downtowners? Why is there evidence from as far away as Wisconsin that the Cahokian religion was being proselytized and effectively forced down the throats of the locals via economic might?

Why are these Living Saints, as many counterculture woo-woos have it, suddenly shopping for shoes in the feet of clay department?

I confess that I am uber-gleeful about this. I do not subscribe to a worldview that, once upon a time, before icky-ptoo-ptoo Men got hold of things, there was a beautiful wonderful peaceful womanly world, and matrilineality is the last teensy vestige of that demi-Paradise. Ha! All these sacrifices, hugely overwhelmingly female, in a matrilineal society? Oh dear, got some blood on those girly-hands, don't we?

I also don't for a second buy the "living-in-harmony-with-Mother-Earth" story either. These folks stripped the local landscape bare and planted what supported their chosen life-style. No European involvement possible. When it all came to a halt, the violence of the Plains eternal wars began, and never ended. Massacres (google "Crow Creek" just for giggles), colonization, oh the fun that people have when the lid of powerful neighbors is lifted...all here, present and accounted for in the archeaological record!

So should you read this book? Not unless you're already interested in archeology. If you're a leftover hippie, it's likely to hurt too much. If you're wanting an overview, this ain't it. Definitely for the serious-minded reader. show less

Author Timothy Pauketat is an anthropologist at the University of Illinois; his description of the Cahokia site is fascinating but tragic. The tragic part comes in two stages; the inhabitants of Cahokia were capable of magnificent engineering and administrative works – but were also capable of gruesome human sacrifices. (Many of the victims were young women, and a significant number were pregnant women). The modern part of the tragedy comes with the destruction of much of the site by show more development, until the State of Illinois protected it in the 1980s. The Cahokians left no written records, so what’s known comes from careful archaeological work and inferences from surviving native cultures. Pauketat does an terrific job of explaining how the site was handled over the years and what evidence was used to try and deduce how the Cahokians lived. Recommended.
I have to confess I find the topic of human sacrifices of macabre interest. As far as I can tell, every culture has done this sort of thing at some time in their history – Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Cathaginians, Europeans, Chinese, Africans, Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Polynesians. It’s still done; Google “muti murders”. But don’t ask for images.
A good map of the site, not much in the way of other illustrations. No bibliography but references in the endnotes. show less

I will always remember my Time-Life Mysteries of the Ancient World book, which featured a misty picture of the Cahokia mounds and informed us that no one knows who built these mysterious mounds, or why, (oooOOOoooOOOOooo) before moving on to Easter Island. Either the Time-Life people were slacking off, or more discoveries have been made, because there's enough interesting information about the Cahokians to fill a (small) book.

There's still a lot of "maybe ... or then again, maybe not" going show more on, there is a lot of speculation, but the book contains plenty of satisfying urban planning, human sacrifice (I made notes in case the 2nd Avenue subway construction drags on too long) and iconography. As a bonus, the author deadpans his way through the recounting of the most entertaining Native American myth I have ever come across. show less

I've long been fascinated by Cahokia, the name give to a series of mounds constructed by prehistoric indigenous people in the vicinity of modern day St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Louis, Illinois. Archaeologists have determined that culture thrived at Cahokia circa 1050–1350 CE with 120 earthworks constructed within a 6 square mile area. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people inhabited Cahokia.

The unfortunate part of the Cahokia story is that it's been overlooked due prejudice and stereotypes show more of indigenous North Americans. Even more positive traits such as the assumption that indigenous people were stewards of the environment and peaceful people so that researchers assumed they would never build a large city. As a result many of the mounds were destroyed for highway building and other developments.

Pauketat, a former Illinois State Archaeologist, spent much of his career researching Cahokia. Early in this work he creates a narrative of what it may have been like to walk through Cahokia at its peak. Much of the rest of the work is the history of archaeological research at the site going back to 19th century settlers. From the archaeological work at Cahokia, researchers have learned not only about the activities at the site but also Cahokia's cultural influence elsewhere in North America and modern descendants of the Cahokians show less