Cahokia’s Grand Plaza

 

Sign Explaining the Grand Plaza at Cahokia

Mississippian societies are known for their mounds, but there’s more to them than that even if you just look at community layout at the largest centers. One of the most distinctive characteristics of Mississippian mound centers is that the mounds at the biggest centers are typically grouped very formally around a central plaza. Historic records of the Mississippian societies in the Southeast that survived into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries give some sense of the uses of these plazas, which as you might expect seem to have centered on communal ritual, feasting, games, and other events that brought people together and solidified the authority of the elites who lived on the mounds and governed the commoners. Archaeologists have been slow to give plazas the same level of attention they’ve given mounds for a long time, however. There’s long been a tendency to view them as simply empty spaces devoid of interest compared to the impressive mounds that surround them.

That has started to change over the past twenty years or so, however. One of the early efforts in this direction was a field school at the biggest and most spectacular Mississippian site, Cahokia, in 1989. The results of this research were reported in an article published in 1993, and they reveal that there’s more to Cahokia’s Grand Plaza than meets the eye.

Grand Plaza from Monk's Mound, Cahokia

The American Bottom, where Cahokia is located, is characterized by a relatively flat but gently rolling terrain resulting from many years of the Mississippi River winding its way across the floodplain, creating a wide variety of sand ridges interspersed with lower swales filled with alluvial silt and clay. Given this context, the flatness of the Grand Plaza calls out for some sort of explanation. One possibility is that this is an area where natural deposition of sediment happens to have filled in the swales and covered over the ridges, creating a particularly flat area that the Cahokians took advantage of as a natural plaza site by building mounds around it. Other parts of the Cahokia site that have been excavated appear to have been built on similar natural flats. The other option is that the Cahokians themselves took an area that was dominated by the usual ridge and swale topography and flattened it out by cutting down the ridges and filling in the swales to create an artificially flat plaza. If this were the case it would obviously have important implications for the amount of labor that went into the building of Cahokia, which in turn would be an important factor in understanding the nature of the site and of its influence in other areas.

To investigate this question the researchers started with an electromagnetic conductivity survey of the western portion of the Grand Plaza. Since sand tends to have a lower conductivity than silts and clays, sand ridges should show up in a survey like this as areas of lower conductivity compared to swales. This sort of survey should also pick up underground borrow pits (where material was dug for use in mounds and other construction) that were later filled in, provided the later fill was different in conductivity from the surrounding soil. The survey was followed by core sampling to confirm the results, then by limited excavation of a few blocks in the plaza to get a closer look at the stratigraphy of areas that came up with interesting survey results.

The Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, Cahokia

The conductivity survey found that there was indeed a subterranean sand ridge under part of the plaza, with apparent swales on either side of it. Some apparent borrow pits also showed up. The coring confirmed these results, and five excavation blocks were dug: two on the ridge, two in an adjacent swale, and one in a possible borrow pit.

The excavation results showed pretty clearly that the final flat condition of the plaza was indeed the result of human action rather than natural deposition. There was a very sharp delineation between the underlying natural deposits of both the ridge and the swale and the overlying fill, which contained varying amounts of artifacts and did not look anything like natural alluviation. This was also the case for the borrow pit, where the fill was indeed quite different from the surrounding material and clearly secondary.

From the artifacts found in the fill, it appears that the leveling of the plaza occurred around the time of the transition from the Emergent Mississippian to the Mississippian period, which current dating places around AD 1050. Interestingly, it appears that the leveling was actually a secondary activity after the area had been pretty thoroughly dug over for fill, perhaps to build the early mounds at the site. This means that this may in fact have originally been a naturally flat area (although there’s really no way to be sure) but that the upper layers of soil were stripped away for mound construction early on, only to have the resulting pits and scars covered up later by fill that created the final plaza surface. The authors propose a tentative scenario in which early mound construction during the Emergent Mississippian period took fill from this area, which was at the time away from the main area of occupation along Cahokia Creek to the north, and it was only later, when Cahokia began to really hit its stride, that plans changed and this area was refilled to become the Grand Plaza. Whether this was the case or not, it’s very clear from this study that the history of the Grand Plaza is a lot more complicated than it looks at first site.

Holley, G., Dalan, R., & Smith, P. (1993). Investigations in the Cahokia Site Grand Plaza American Antiquity, 58 (2) DOI: 10.2307/281972