The greatest of the Mississippian mound centers, by far, is Cahokia. This vast site contains numerous mounds and is located in the American Bottom area of southwestern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from the modern city of St. Louis, Missouri. This is a highly strategic location, very close to the confluence of the two largest rivers on the North American continent (the Mississippi and the Missouri), and about twenty years ago Peter Peregrine published a short paper using graph theory to demonstrate that Cahokia was located at the point of highest centrality in the entire Mississippi drainage, potentially giving Cahokia’s inhabitants the ability to control riverine trade across a large portion of the continent. In addition, the American Bottom is an area of very fertile bottomlands along the Mississippi potentially allowing for substantial agricultural surpluses. As early as 1964 Charles Bareis noted that the configuration of the mounds at Cahokia relative to the meander loops where the Mississippi had changed its course over time indicated that the river had been relatively stable over time in this region, changing its channel much less frequently than in areas further downstream. The combination of fertile soil and a relatively stable, predictable river could have combined with the strategic location within the river system to provide the conditions under which Cahokia rose to prominence.
Ecological/geographical explanations like this for the rise of “complex” societies like Cahokia were quite popular among processual archaeologists from the 1960s to the 1980s, but they have since been challenged by a newer generation of archaeologists influenced by the post-processual movement that began in Europe. As Michelle Hegmon noted in an important summary of the theoretical status of North American archaeology a few years ago, Americanists have generally not been inclined to go all the way over to European-style post-processualism, instead adopting elements of both processual and post-processual approaches in varying ways. Hegmon labels the resulting theoretical orientation “processual-plus,” and that seems like an apt description to me.
With regard to Cahokia specifically, the main voices for the “processual-plus” perspective have been Thomas Emerson and Timothy Pauketat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Pauketat, in particular, has argued vigorously for what he calls a “historical-processual” approach to archaeology, incorporating the insights of processual culture ecology as well as a more historical-particularist approach more associated with post-processualism. One of his more important contributions along these lines has been a 2003 paper discussing both Cahokia and an area to the east, in the uplands surrounding the American Bottom, that contains what he calls the “Richland Complex”: a group of rural agricultural sites that appear to date to right around the time of the rise of Cahokia, circa 1050 AD. Cahokia rose very rapidly, and it’s apparent that the population increase in the mid-eleventh century couldn’t possibly have been due solely to natural increase. Migration from surrounding areas seems to have been a major part of the development of the site, and Pauketat argues that the Richland Complex also shows evidence of having been rapidly settled around the same time. This area was apparently very sparsely populated before this, and the settlements established in the eleventh century show sufficient diversity in material culture to suggest that their resident immigrated from different areas. Some show a particularly distinctive pottery style typical of southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas, also found at Cahokia itself, which suggests migration from that region into the American Bottom at the time of the rise of Cahokia. (This may be particularly important in explaining the Mississippian phenomenon in general, for reasons I’ll discuss in a future post.)
A recent article in Science discussing recent research in the Cahokia area has drawn the notice of Mike Smith at Arizona State, one of the foremost authorities on ancient urbanism. He seems pretty comfortable with the idea that Cahokia was a city (an idea strongly pushed by the interpretive material at the site itself), but he does question the assertion that it had a lower population density than the Maya cities, which apparently had notably low population densities within the urban centers themselves but notably high densities in the rural areas outside the cities:
Now I don’t know the demographic data for Cahokia and its hinterland, but I think the population density within the Cahokia urban center was probably HIGHER than within Maya cities, but the population density of the “Greater Cahokia” region was most likely lower than that of the Maya lowlands.
Maya cities had very low URBAN population densities (even compared to a sprawling modern city like Phoenix):
- Tikal (Maya): 600 persons per square kilometer
- New York City: 9,400
- Phoenix: 1,900
But the Maya lowlands had a very high REGIONAL population densities:
- Maya lowlands: 180 persons per sq. km
- New York State: 150
- Illinois: 80
- Arizona: 17
The high density of Maya regional populations (how many people lived on the landscape, whether in large or small settlements) is one of the remarkable features of ancient Maya society. I’d be interested to see how Cahokia fits in comparison with these figures.
Population estimates for Cahokia vary, as you might expect, but I figured I could chime in with Pauketat’s estimates from his 2003 paper. It’s important to note here that Pauketat is an advocate for a larger, more urban Cahokia than that seen by some other archaeologists, so his figures are relatively high compared to some other estimates, but he goes into some detail in this paper about where he gets his figures and his procedure seems reasonable to me.
For the core area of Cahokia, which is about 1.8 square kilometers in area, Pauketat calculates a population range of 10,000 to 16,000 people at the site’s peak during the Lohmann Phase (ca. AD 1050 to 1100), which equates to a population density of about 5500 to 8900 people per square km. As Smith suspected, this is much higher than Classic Maya cities like Tikal. Indeed, it’s much higher than contemporary St. Louis, which has about 2000 people per square km, and at the high end it approaches the density of New York! Calculating the regional density is trickier because of limited survey coverage in some areas, but for the 300-square-km Richland Complex specifically (a relatively dense rural area), Pauketat calculates a population range of 3000 to 7400 people for roughly the same period, which equals a density of 10 to 25 people per square km. Again, as Smith predicts, this is much lower than the Maya regional density and down with the more sparsely populated US states like Arizona. It’s lower than both Illinois (89 people per square km) and Missouri (34 people per square km) today.
There’s way more to say about Cahokia. The literature on this site is vast, not unlike the literature on Chaco. (Observant readers may have noted some striking similarities between the two sites, which I’ll discuss later.) Given that Cahokia is widely acknowledged these days to have been a city, population density is a useful way to look at it and to compare it to other cities. There are other aspects of this fascinating site worthy of discussion, however, and I’ll have much more on it soon.
Bareis, C. (1964). Meander Loops and the Cahokia Site American Antiquity, 30 (1) DOI: 10.2307/277637
Hegmon, M. (2003). Setting Theoretical Egos Aside: Issues and Theory in North American Archaeology American Antiquity, 68 (2) DOI: 10.2307/3557078
Lawler, A. (2011). America’s Lost City Science, 334 (6063), 1618-1623 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6063.1618
Pauketat, T. (2003). Resettled Farmers and the Making of a Mississippian Polity American Antiquity, 68 (1) DOI: 10.2307/3557032
Peregrine, P. (1991). A Graph-Theoretic Approach to the Evolution of Cahokia American Antiquity, 56 (1) DOI: 10.2307/280973
You’re naturally way ahead of me on the archaeology, but do you recall that Jane Jacobs early in “The Economy of Cities” went to some lengths to dispute the idea that cities thrive mainly because of river access or natural resources generally? Her notion was the really determining factors were their internal economy and trade relations with other places. It sounds like her thinking has parallels in archaeology.
Yeah, as you might expect there’s a lot of debate in archaeological circles about the conditions under which cities and complex societies in general arise. I don’t know a whole lot about the details, since these arguments mostly concern societies other than the ones I mostly focus on. Mike Smith, whose blog post reacting to the Cahokia piece I linked in this post, has been very active on this subject, and has argued that there should be more collaboration between archaeologists and planners/geographers/etc. on researching this stuff.
Wandering the fields in eastern North Carolina for nearly 60 years and finding potsherds nearly everywhere I’ve often wondered about the density of occupation and population.
For easterners who may be reading this blog there were mounds related to the Mississippian culture scattered all over North Carolina including one reported site on the banks of the Currituck Sound within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. Chunky Stones as described in Bill Pauketat’s book “Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi” are also a relatively frequently occurring artifact.
And lastly there’s the Mississippian related archaeological site called Xuala or Joara near present day Morganton, North Carolina evidently visited by De Sota and used as a fort and base of operations by Juan Pardo probably because of the strategic location of the site at the eastern terminus of a very gradual and direct trans- Appalachian mountain route. This “fort” was established in the 1560’s decades before the attempted establishment of the first English colony on Roanoke Island and nearly 2 centuries before English exploration near the region by for example John Lawson.
The site also makes North Carolina the site of not one but 2 “Lost Colonies” Both by the way just off US 64 which passes through Farmington NM and ends at Teec Nos Pos! http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/169/entry
@Cola Vaughan
Thanx for the link and your interesting post.
I Ihave yet to see any credible methodology in population estimates for Cahokia.
I found Pauketat’s methodology in his 2003 paper (based on repeated rebuilding of houses in excavated areas) pretty reasonable. It depends on a whole bunch of assumptions, of course, but then so do all population estimates.
Amazing posts on Cahokia. I’m looking forward to more. One question – short of going back for a graduate degree, is there a relatively inexpensive way to gain access to the various jstor journals? I could go to the Chicago Public Library – there access only extends on site. It used to be available at home to those with a library card. But with a new baby in the house, lengthy sojourns at the library aren’t going to happen soon.
Anyway, thanks for the great, interesting blog.
Thanks for the kind words, and congrats on the baby. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell there isn’t really a cheap way to access JSTOR short of having an affiliation with a subscribing institution. I currently have access through work, but only on-site, and it’s quite an adjustment from the remote access I had when I was in school. A small but increasing number of individual academics have started posting versions of their articles on their own institutional or personal websites, so if you’re looking for a particular article it’s worth looking up the author(s) to see if there’s a free version somewhere. Also, JSTOR itself has free access to early articles that are no longer covered by copyright (pre-1923 for stuff published in the US), and some of the journal publishers also offer some of their back issues online for free. Beyond that, though, there’s not much you can do to access journals without an institutional affiliation.
Accessing journals: I do have access through the school but frequently just put the title into google and fairly often it turns out that someone has stuck the paper you are looking for on line. Doesn’t always work, but it’s worth the time.
I just discovered this blog and find it very interesting so I’ll be working through it over the next few months. A question still very much in the mix is – Is Cahokia (and the immediately affiliated sites) a state? Guy Gibbon, I think it was, called it the Ramey State. I think it qualifies as what I call a “nascent state” which got nipped in the bud so to speak. I worked on a site of the same time period in south-central Minnesota (at least the Stirling Period) which produced its own version of Ramey pottery, and here’s a note from some one in NC with Mississippian sites all over the place. It all seems a bit more than say a chiefdom could handle – and a state has to start somewhere. Too bad the weather and the population went to pot at the same time.