Native American city on the Mississippi was America's first 'melting pot'

[n2doc]

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New evidence establishes for the first time that Cahokia, a sprawling, pre-Columbian city situated at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, hosted a sizable population of immigrants.

Cahokia was an early experiment in urban life, said Thomas Emerson, who led the new analysis. Emerson is Illinois state archaeologist and the director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois.

Researchers have traditionally thought of Cahokia as a relatively homogeneous and stable population drawn from the immediate area, he said.

“But increasingly archaeologists are realizing that Cahokia at AD 1100 was very likely an urban center with as many as 20,000 inhabitants,” he said. “Such early centers around the world grow by immigration, not by birthrate.”

more

http://news.illinois.edu/news/14/0303cahokia_ThomasEmerson.html

[Scootaloo]

1. Hardly a surprise

The breadth of both continents was well-populated, connected by trade, and dotted with cities and expansive communities. The image of "indian tribes in the woods" is based on the conditions of the survivors of a century and a half of plagues tearing through these communities. These epidemics are themselves proof of dense and well-connected populations. You can't spread smallpox or measles or influenzaamong peopel with zero immunity, without there being such things - the disease will kill too swiftly to become epidemic.

[DreamGypsy]

2. National Geographic had a very good article on the history of Cahokia in January 2011

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/cahokia/hodges-text#

The article discusses some of the differing views that researchers had about the size, population, and purpose of Cahokia.

"You know what they say," says Bill Iseminger, an archaeologist who has worked at Cahokia for 40 years. "Put three archaeologists in a room and you get five opinions."

He's not exaggerating much. Even when Cahokia scholars agree, they tend to frame their positions so it seems like they're disagreeing—but there are points of general consensus. Everyone agrees that Cahokia developed quickly a couple centuries after corn became an important part of the local diet, that it drew together people from the American Bottom, and that it dwarfed other Mississippian communities in size and scope. The battle lines tend to form along the questions of how populous it was, how centralized its political authority and economic organization were, and the nature and extent of its reach and influence.

At one extreme you have descriptions of Cahokia as a "theater of power," a hegemonic empire sustained by force that reached deep into the Mississippian world and perhaps connected to Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Maya or Toltec. At the other extreme you have characterizations of Cahokia as little more than an especially large Mississippian town whose residents had a talent for making big piles of dirt. But as usual, most of the action happens in the middle area between those poles.

Right now the discussion is being spearheaded by Tim Pauketat at the University of Illinois, who with his colleague Tom Emerson argues that Cahokia’s big bang was the product of a visionary moment: A leader, prophet, or group cast a vision for a new way of living that attracted people from far and near, creating a rapidly expanding cultural movement.

When I meet Pauketat at Cahokia to see the site through his eyes, he's more interested in showing me what he's found in the uplands several miles to the east: signs that Cahokians held sway over outlying laborer communities that supplied food to the city and its elites—evidence, Pauketat argues, that Cahokia's political economy was centralized and broad reaching. This is a controversial theory, because the research supporting it hasn't been published yet, and because it goes to the heart of the argument about just what kind of society Cahokia was.

So, now some of Emerson's research has been published and the archaeologists will have further data to discuss. Cool.



Thanks for the post, n2doc.