Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi by Timothy R. Pauketat

     This was a really cool and concise book about Cahokia, basically detailing a brief history of the major discoveries relating to the mounds and what we know about them. He also talks about how there are smaller mound complexes throughout the Mississippi river valley, although many have been destroyed. Some of them are in Poverty Point, Louisiana, Spiro, Oklahoma, Troyville, Louisiana, and Little Rock, Arkansas.

    One interesting thing about Cahokia is that there is sort of a "big bang" where it emerged all at once sometime around 1050 AD. Mounds had been built before in the Mississippi valley (Poverty Point dates to 1600 BC) but this was a much bigger complex that could have hosted over 10,000 people. Pauketat says that the initial construction of Cahokia may be associated with the "guest star" supernova that was visible all around the world starting on July 4, 1054. It was a supernova in the Crab Nebula that was one of just 50 ever recorded and three in our own galaxy. It was visible four times brighter than Venus and was visible for night and day for 23 days afterwards and then a prominent feature of the night sky for another two years. There were all sorts of interpretations and omens drawn from this and it may have provided some inspiration for building the Cahokia site.

    The mounds of Cahokia were works-in-progress, with the central platform mound initially being a 20-foot pyramid that would rise to over a hundred feet after 150 years, making it the third-largest pyramid in the Americas, after only the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan and thee Huaca del Sol in Peru. For reference, the Great Pyramid of Giza is about 450 feet tall. Of the 120+ mounds of Cahokia, less than half are anything near their original proportions.

    It seems like a lot of the mounds had flat tops that would have had temples or houses or other structures on them. But on at least one mound, the flat top was the site of a sacrifice that would have been watched from below, where witnesses would have seen 53 women killed and buried so that the mound would have a unique ridge top. Ridge top mounds are found in very few other places in the world besides Cahokia. There is also evidence of huge feasts at Cahokia, with incredibly dense remains that would have involved killing over the course of a few days hundreds of deer, using hundreds of pots, and smoking enough tobacco to produce more than a million charred seeds. Scholars think that attendees at festivals would have exceeded over ten thousand, who would have all had to literally walk to the area. 

    There's a huge debate going on about whether or not Cahokian culture was imitating Meso-American culture, with the primary evidence being the pyramids. Additionally, since there is evidence that people from Cahokia travelled as far as Montana on one hand and the Appalachians on the other, we know that people were travelling distances great enough for there to have been interactions. However, there is a dearth of real archaeological finds that would indicate trading of material goods between the two areas. Also, some mounds have existed in the area of the Mississippi long before the Meso-Americans built their pyramids, so their inspiration was not a requirement for Cahokians to see.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Mississippians used to play a game called chunkey, which involved rolling a stone puck and throwing sticks at it and trying to get as close as possible while running.