CCD   HISTORY 201 - History of United States 1

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

ROGER G. KENNEDY, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization. New York: Free Press, 1994, vii, 372 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $24.95 cloth.

THOMAS E. EMERSON, Cahokia and the Archeology of Power. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997, xv, 317 pp., illustrations, tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index, $29.95 paper.

R. BARRY LEWIS and CHARLES STOUT, eds., Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces: Searching for an Architectural Grammar. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998, xiv, 304 pp., illustrations, tables, maps, references, bibliography, index, $29.95 paper.

Explorer Henry M. Brackenridge, writing to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, reported on recent travels in the Louisiana Territory, relating significant aspects of his reconnaissance along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers:

I am perfectly satisfied that cities similar to those of ancient Mexico, of several hundred thousand souls, have existed in this part of the country. Nearly opposite St. Louis there are traces of two such cities, in the distance of five miles, on the bank of the Cohokia, which crosses the American bottom at this place. There are not less than one hundred mounds, in two different groups; one of the mounds falls little short of the Egyptian pyramid Mycerius.(n1)

More than a century elapsed before the Cahokia Mounds would be set aside as public domain, owned since 1925 by the citizens of Illinois and only recently declared a United Nations "World Heritage Site" parallel in cultural significance to Teotihuacan, Mexico; Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Monument in Colorado; and Head-Smashed-In, a buffalo "jump" used for thousands of years by Plains Indians in present-day southern Alberta. Despite its enormous size---extending over 5.8 miles--as well as its proximity to French settlements at St. Louis and Kaskaskia, the site was largely ignored during French colonial times. Only in 1796 was it first placed on a map, and even then the central core of the city was not designated. In 1809, Nicholas Jerrot claimed four hundred acres of the rich alluvial land between two creeks and donated the parcel to a group of Trappist Monks from Kentucky, who built a monastery there and used the largest earth mound for garden terraces.(n2) It was during this period that Henry Brackenridge observed the mound, later reflecting,

When I examined it in 1811, I was astonished that this stupendous monument of antiquity should have been unnoticed by any traveller: I afterwards published an account in the newspapers at St. Louis, detailing its dimensions, describing its form, position, &c. but this, which I thought might almost be considered a discovery, attracted no notice: and yet I stated it to be eight hundred paces in circumference (the exact size of the pyramid of Asychis) and one hundred feet in height.(n3)

Shortly thereafter, in 1813, the monastery was abandoned due to disease. Several private owners occupied the site during the next century. For example, in 1831, T. Ames Hill built his private residence atop the large mound, by then known as Monk's Mound.(n4) More than twenty years later, amateur relic hunters and a few incipient archaeologists combed Cahokia, but none understood the cardinal significance of this once-great city, and nearly all found it impossible to believe that Native Americans could have planned and engineered such a sophisticated complex, opting to explain it only as an unsolved mystery, perhaps the work of a lost tribe of non-Indians.(n5)

By virtue of its assumed disassociation with prehistoric Indians and its imposing mounds and depressions, this great prehistoric metropolis practically escaped the farmer's plow and the bulldozer and suffered minimal damage from the grave robber's shovel. The largest urban metropolis north of Mexico was saved by disbelief, ignorance, and a preconceived view of the Indians of this area as more akin to transhumant Plains hunters than to urban Southeastern farmers.(n6) As the curators of the Mississippian exhibition, "Towns and Temples," put it in 1981,

There is a common misconception that all American Indian peoples lived as nomadic, horse-back-riding bison hunters of the Plains. Buffalo Bill shows of an earlier era, "Wild West" movies, and much popular television today, helped create and reinforce these characterizations of 19th century Indian life in the American west. Some of the general public are aware that other quite different Indian lifeways existed before Indian people were forced into the Great Plains by western frontier expansion. But the popular stereotype of the Indian on the nickel, the tipi-dwelling Plains warrior on horseback, still rests firmly in the forefront of the public mind.(n7)

Roger Kennedy's Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization traces that story through an architectural and biographical tour of the mound cities of eastern North America and their interpreters. A former director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and director of the National Park Service, Kennedy's previous work ranges widely from monographs on the history of American churches and Greek Revival architecture in America to American relations with France during the Revolutionary War. Kennedy uses classic definitions of the city and building to weigh the urban landscapes of Adena-Hopewell (500 B.C.-400/A.D. 500) and Mississippian (A.D. 800-1750)(n8) peoples. In each case, the course followed from hamlet to town and city complexes, some similar to those built by the Natchez and still in use in the eighteenth century. "By city we mean a place in which a large number of people gather for common purposes; citizens determine cities. By building we mean a large three-dimensional construction, whether made of masonry, wood, stone, metal, or earth" (p. xii). Kennedy evaluates the ruins of these complexes in the context of colonial and early Federal period scholars, explorers, and administrators who took an interest in them as unique features of America's ancient past.

Chapter one makes the case for acknowledging the mound builders as "The Founders of American Architecture" whose towns and cities Kennedy sees foremost as ceremonial "sacred areas," central to maintenance of priesthoods and the burying places they chose for themselves rather like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Individual chapters begin with Albert Gallatin, the Swiss immigrant best remembered for his terms as secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson and Madison and his diplomatic work as minister to France and later to England. Gallatin was an empiricist, and he was the nation's first serious student of American Indian languages. In 1781, he went to Maine to learn how to use a birch bark canoe. He explored Adena-Hopewell mounds in the Ohio River Valley, read widely, and provided Lewis and Clark with important maps for their trip west. His logical reconstruction of Mexico's influence on North American architecture and subsistence led him to reject the theory that the great mound cities of the East, especially those of the Mississippi Valley, had been built by Egyptians or Hindus or Lost Tribes of Israel, arguing that they were influenced by civilizations in Mexico and were the handiwork of a race "indigenous" and akin to the same stock as the "savages" better known throughout the United States (p. 38). Gallatin's lifetime of work on the American Indian established a baseline of data still useful. In 1836, he completed a project at the request of the American Philosophical Society with his 422-page A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British and Russian Possessions of North America, a comparison of eighty-one tribes and the first division of Native American languages into "families."

Chapters follow on Gallatin's influence and the independent exploration and thinking of George Rogers Clark, George Washington, and others of the Revolutionary generation who combined curiosity about the ancient mounds with land speculation and the expansion of plantation agriculture. Kennedy correlates Washington's land holdings with the best-suited riverbank and valley floors used centuries before by earlier American horticulturists. Although neither Washington nor Jefferson credited Indians with the accomplishments attributed them by Gallatin, Jefferson could have done so given the information gathered by Lewis and Clark, William Dunbar, Henry Brackenridge, and other scientist/explorers sent out by the Sage of Monticello to satisfy his curiosity and promote American expansion. So argues Kennedy, who finds Jefferson fighting an intellectual battle with eighteenth-century romantics who preferred to believe that all Indians existed in a "savage," noncivilized, and therefore nonurban state, and nineteenth-century American expansionists who justified displacement of American Indians for the absence of a tradition to properly husband their lands. Kennedy's explanation oversimplifies the complex connection between the world of the book-bound European and American intellectuals and field-working "natural scientists" and could have benefited from perspectives offered over the past thirty years by William H. Goetzmann, Donald Jackson, John Allen, James Ronda, and others who have analyzed science in the age of Jefferson.(n9) Nevertheless, Kennedy's point that ground gained in science was soon to be lost with the passing of Jefferson and his cabinet is well taken. On his death in 1826, tragically, his Indian Hall artifacts that graced the entrance at Monticello were dispersed or thrown away, symbolic, Kennedy claims, of nineteenth-century Americans' renewed view of Indians as "savages" and "heathens":

His countrymen unlearned what Jefferson had learned over his lifetime about Indian antiquity, as they pursued policies toward contemporary Indians which, it is sad to admit, he himself had permitted to supplant those of George Washington and the Cincinnati. Hastily and unrepentantly, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians thrust the Indians aside by means which might lie easier on the conscience if those displaced were thought to have neither history, art nor religion worthy of the respect of the displacers. They collected cases full of Indian artifacts but the spirit of collection became increasingly dissociated from a regard for the people whose work was collected. (p. 223)

The post-Jeffersonian retrenchment found many Americans returning to the "Lost Tribes" school, first postulated in the sixteenth century by Spanish friars and put to use for their own purposes by seventeenth-century New England Puritans such as John Eliot and the dissenter, Roger Williams. Williams's The Hope of Israel argued for conversion rather than extermination of Indians. It argued that Jewish Indians had come with other immigrants from Asia after the Assyrian conquest of Israel had dispersed the tribes. By this reasoning, Indian lives and property should be treated with respect, a view adopted most consistently by William Penn and the Quakers of Pennsylvania.

Following the American Revolution, the idea of "white Indians" gained supporters through secular and nonsecular publications. One school associated the Mandan Indians and their earthlodge villages on the bluffs of the Missouri River with ancient Welsh colonists under Madoc, who set forth in A.D. 1170 with ten ships to explore the western seas, never to return. Even Jefferson was intrigued by this possibility, but Lewis and Clark's ethnographic report on the Mandans left the issue unsettled. Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews; or the Lost Tribes of Israel in America (1823) presaged Joseph Smith's The Book of Mormon (1830), although the two Smiths were not kin. Ancient Jaredites, who had come to America in 2000 B.C., and historic Nephites linked American Indians and their ancient structures with Old World roots. Kennedy explains, "Smith became the founder of the only world religion to be based in American archaeology" (p. 230).

By 1840, wherever the Indian fit into the cosmography and epistemology of European explanations of North America, his numbers were rapidly declining due to disease, relocations, displacements, and warfare: "Indian accomplishments were erased by allocating all that was interesting in their work to someone--almost anyone--else," Kennedy contends (pp. 236-7). What followed for the next thirty years was an onslaught of "American racial apologetics" mostly literary efforts to dispel Indian origins of ancient accomplishments. This was countered but not matched by men and women of American science, who were mostly consistent in supporting the Revolutionary generation's opinion that the mounds were Indian built. The scientific view broadened when Samuel G. Morton, the father of American physical anthropology, studied skeletons from the mounds and from more recent Indian graves, concluding they were the same "race" of people. New momentum built after establishment of the Smithsonian Institution and publication in 1848 of E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis's Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, the first survey of its kind.(n10) For a short time, the pendulum appeared to swing backward when Cyrus Thomas was appointed by John Wesley Powell, director of the Bureau of Ethnology, to head the Division of Mound Exploration in 1881. When he assumed his post, Thomas was a "pronounced believer in... a race of Mound Builders distinct from the American Indians" but he turned full circle and by decade's end was the nation's staunchest supporter of Indian masons and earth builders. His self-stated purpose was the following:

The most important question to be settled is "were the mounds built by the Indians?" The Director of the Bureau of Ethnology was desirous, therefore, that this important question be settled, as it is the pivot on which all the other problems must turn.(n11)

Most of Thomas's 730-page report with its elaborate sketches and maps of mounds from Florida to Oklahoma was an obituary on mound groups already incorporated into or subsumed by American farms, roads, and towns. The few that remained intact were anomalies. The pace of development quickened with the turn of the calendar into the twentieth century. By 1948, 90 percent of the great earthen architecture available to Squier and Davis a century earlier had been obliterated. Still, what remained was worth saving. Following release of Thomas's report, new interest was sparked in preservation and study of such places as Serpent Mound near Marietta, Ohio. This, in tandem with a certain fascination with Southwestern Anasazi ruins, led to passage of the Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities in 1906, the most important law dealing with Indian material culture and remains prior to the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act of 1990.

Kennedy's story does not end there. He extends the reader's tour to include scientific and philosophical considerations for "why the mounds were built." His interest here is connecting architectural design and space with purpose and symbolism. Going beyond his evidence, he postulates interesting parallels in use of circles, squares, and octagons worldwide and theorizes as to why thousands of people would spend much of their lives moving millions of tons of earth in small baskets to create monumental public works. His conclusion: the world of the mound builders was not one of highly stratified chieftainships in which peasants labored under the rule of a hereditary nobility. Rather, the mound builders were more akin to communities of commoners who worked willingly on public projects under the direction of a priesthood of astronomer-engineer-architects. He adds,

Perhaps the geomancers selected to lead the creation of architecture did only that, and were chosen from a larger number from time to time, as the monks at Cluny, Premontre, and under the rule of St. Benedict select their abbots, and as most Buddhist monks select their lamas to lead for a time and then return to the ranks, having only earned burial amid rich celebration of their achievements. (p. 276)

This is an interesting alternative view to the dominant one of the rigid hierarchal structure of Mississippian society, a perspective undoubtedly influenced by Kennedy's previous work on the architectural history of churches.(n12)

Another bias is also revealed when he suggests that Mississippians may have been far less urban than we assume by physical evidence of their ceremonial mound centers. He is influenced by archaeologist Bruce Smith's analysis of Adena-Hopewellian society in Ohio as one in which "populations were distributed across the landscape in small settlements .... [They inhabited] agricultural communities consisting of individual single family farmsteads scattered along river valley segments,"(n13) evidence, he suggests, that indicates a Jeffersonian ideal:

Here were no dull, drilled, and doltish peasantry, laboring under the lash. Instead, we may imagine them as America's first free and independent yeomen, living on their own modest farms, striding the forest and prairie after game, neither drawn to bright city lights nor abasing themselves to a primogenitrous, entailed local gentry. (pp. 276-7)

Hidden Cities is delightful reading and raises very interesting questions. However, most archeologists and ethnohistorians are likely to have trouble with the Jeffersonian analogy. Kennedy's thinking about an idealized Jeffersonian society may be closer to reality in the Adena-Hopewell system than with the Mississippian world after A.D. 1000. Nearly all specialists agree that Mississippian culture was both hierarchal and permeated with hereditary offices and priesthoods, some of which were well documented in the colonial period. To explore the evolution of thinking on Mississippian social structure, we return to Cahokia, in which recent literature suggests that hierarchies, often labeled as "chieftainships," may have resembled an expansionary statheood with colonies and dependencies far from central authority.

Now recognized as the third-largest single monumental public structure in the Western Hemisphere (after the Great Temple at Cholula and the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan), Monk's Mound measures about 1,000 feet north-south and 770 feet east-west. Its base occupies 15 acres, atop of which 660,000 cubic meters of earth rises 30 meters, created, it is widely thought, over a period of two hundred years between A.D. 950 and A.D. 1150 and modified thereafter until the site was abandoned sometime in the late thirteenth or fourteenth century--for reasons still debated.(n14) Among archaeologists, the 4,000-acre core of the city has long been recognized as spatially the most extensive of all "Mississippian"(n15) sites, with more than 120 mounds in the Cahokia group alone and extensive evidence of suburbs or satellites radiating 6 miles from the center of the city. Cahokia also has been viewed as the most significant urban enclave for application of various models to explain the larger phenomena of Mississippian lifeways, settlement patterns, and economic interaction throughout the eastern United States. In 1985, the dean of twentieth-century southeastern archaeology, James B. Griffin, offered a list of common traits of Mississippian peoples(n16) but deferred to Lynne G. Goldstein's "admirable identification of 'Mississippian'" as a cultural system, which,

when compared to that of the preceding Late Woodland period, represents a vastly increased level of complexity in the technological, social and organizational realms. Mississippians had agriculture and specialization of labor trade and social ranking--theirs was a cultural system which required a diversity of material forms and social positions.(n17)

The models from Cahokia(n18) have served in comparing the development of peer cities, especially Etowah and Ocmulgee in Georgia, Moundville in Alabama, Hiwassee in Tennessee, and Spiro in Oklahoma, five of the largest of the thousands of known Mississippian towns that dotted the North American landscape between A.D. 700 and 1700.(n19) These towns are the driving parameters in two recent books under consideration here from University of Alabama Press that further inform the discussion of Cahokia's centrality to the world of Mississippians at large and readdress important questions of possible state-level development in eastern North America. Both of them build on eighty years of digging and thinking about the meaning of the site of Cahokia, especially the central plaza and Monk's Mound. To understand these recent publications, it is necessary to follow the historiographical trail that led to the latest thinking on Cahokia's importance.

By the 1980s, Cahokia archaeology had become a cottage industry within that discipline's subculture. However, for the general public, until very recently, Cahokia remained an incognate, despite its proximity to downtown St. Louis. For students at colleges and universities, the 1980s brought major changes in exposure to ancient urban North America. Writers of a new generation of four major U.S. history survey textbooks included vignettes on Cahokia in the opening chapters introducing the land and the peoples before the European invasion.(n20) By the 1990s, nearly all major texts followed their lead. Those using John Mack Faragher's widely adopted Out of Many: A History of the American People (1994, 2nd ed., 1997) are given the following introductory look at "Thirteenth Century Life on the Mississippi":

As the sun rose over the rich floodplain, people walked to work down the narrow streets of their riverbank city. Some hurried to shops where they manufactured tools, crafted pottery, worked metal, or fashioned ornamental jewelry--goods destined to be exchanged in the far corners of the continent .... This thirteenth-century city was not in preindustrial Europe but in North America. It flourished long before the first European explorer arrived .... In its heyday, in the mid-1200s, Cahokia was an urban cluster of perhaps 30,000 people. Its farm fields were abundant with corn, beans, and pumpkins, crops no European had ever seen .... Cahokia thrived but then withered and died in the fourteenth century, as did dozens of other urban clusters along the banks of North America's vast inland river system.(n21)

America's ancient cities also made a large splash among the television and video-viewing public by way of the miniseries, 500 NATIONS, which aired in 1994 and has become standard curricular material in many classrooms since. Computer-generated reconstructions of Teotihuacan, the central city of the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan, Anasazi life in Chaco Canyon at Pueblo Bonito, and the urban settlement landscape of Cahokia were prominently featured in "The Ancestors" the opening segment in the series hosted by Kevin Costner.(n22)

Both the new textbook writers and the videographers' version of ancient America reflect the trend to connect the material and ideological worlds of the mound builders with a much larger geographic area than the archaeological sites themselves might suggest. The literature since the early 1970s supports this, but there is disagreement over terms and extensiveness of outreach. A symposium on Cahokia was held in 1968, synthesizing what was known at the time and launching a new generation of scholarly studies.(n23) One of the participants, Patrick J. O'Brien, soon moved beyond traditional views to suggest that Cahokia met all the criteria established by V. Gordon Childe in the nascent stages of the "urban revolutionary process."(n24)

In 1989, O'Brien suggested that Cahokia achieved "state" level of development. Mass graves with human sacrifices, stratification of classes as evidenced in burial customs, and the layout of the city provided three independent lines of evidence toward this conclusion.(n25) O'Brien's subsequent work links the elaborate trading and craft specialization of the Cahokian state with a world-systems approach. In his interpretation, this state-like polity existed from A.D. 850 to 1400, dominating the central eastern Woodlands from A.D. 1000 to 1300.(n26) Its core area produced prestige goods for a ruling elite, but staple commodities were extracted from tributaries at a distance. Copper came from Upper Michigan; mica from the Carolinas; meat, chert, and hides from the Plains; and shells from the Gulf Coast.(n27) These views are consistent with the broadly held tenet that Mississippian culture "expanded" from central ceremonial and production centers, best summarized by Bruce D. Smith.(n28)

Two subsequent symposia on Cahokia in the 1970s brought young and older scholars together and revealed marked differences in interpreting Cahokia.(n29) The organizers of a 1983 Society for American Archaeology symposium subsequently published the contributions in 1991 as Cahokia and the Hinterlands.(n30) Used together with these two new books, readers have the best statement available of the two camps, which author Thomas E. Emerson has described as differences in understanding the mechanisms of "intrusion or diffusion."(n31) Emerson's own view--that too much emphasis has been placed on subsistence, trade, and material culture and too little on ideological, religious, and political systems--is explored in Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power. Using data from his own excavations in the rural countryside peripheral to urban Cahokia, Emerson does not depart from the premise that Cahokia exerted influence on its hinterland. How that evolved and how it was accomplished by ideological persuasion and political coercion, as reflected in the material world, is his story.(n32) And it is a fascinating one, introduced conceptually to readers of American Anthropologist in 1991 in the exploratory essay, "The Ideology of Authority and the Power of the Pot," in which Emerson joined senior scholar Timothy R. Pauketat in an analysis of ceremonial vessels.(n33) Distinguishing "prestige goods" from "utilitarian" ones, Emerson divides the former into

(1) status markers or badges of authority that symbolize office or rank and thus are restricted in distribution, and (2) wealth items that are used to meet social obligations such as marriage alliances, initiation fees, and death payments and that are more widely disbursed in the community. (p. 34)

On the basis of distribution of architectural patterns, mortuary patterns, and the concentrations of prestige/wealth items, including religious and symbolic artifacts (e.g., effigy vessels, ceremonial pots, and incised shells) as well as ritual plants, Emerson rejects the notion that the Cahokians built a true "state." Rather, he argues, through evidence of an "architecture of power," one finds incorporation of commoners as well as coercion by elites in small villages, which were more than farming hamlets. These outliers contained civic ceremonial "nodes" marked by storage units, ritual sweat lodges, men's community houses, and council houses. The small towns also contained "artifacts of power," not unlike those in the larger city. These included objects of hematite, galena, shell, limonite, mica, and copper, "present in many households" Symbolic items of ideological power included flint clay figurines, engraved sherds, ceramic vessels, and ethnobotanical evidence of "sacred" plants: red cedar, jimsonweed, and tobacco (pp. 265-6).

Convinced of the correlation between building types, space, and distribution of prestige goods, Emerson believes that "it is difficult to envision that the lords of Cahokia rose to the heights without total hegemonic control over the masses" (p. 267). His thesis is provocative and is an elaboration of an essay contributed to yet another edited anthology on Cahokia focusing on "domination and ideology in the Mississippian world."(n34)

R. Barry Lewis and Charles Stout continue the discussion with their edited work, Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces, the result of a 1993 symposium of the same title.(n35) For students of urban ancient America, this is an excellent introductory primer on Mississippian town building and pairs nicely with another recent University of Alabama Press publication, Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley.(n36) In their search for an "architectural grammar," the contributors go beyond the study of platform mounds, burial mounds, and palisaded villages, focusing instead on the central plazas within these communities. In a refreshing discussion of terms, Lewis, Stout, and Cameron B. Wesson establish their definition of town as "a habitation center with a public area, such as a plaza or courtyard, that may be flanked by one or more mounds" (p. 5). They find the terms mound center, ceremonial center, and trade center as meaningless as such terms as habitation center, administrative center, defensive center, and storage center. Just as in Mexico, they argue that plazas are the key to unraveling the grammar of the architecture. These "no man's lands" in the sketchbooks of previous archaeologists become the guiding element for identifying Mississippian cultural influence. Chapters follow testing the presence or absence of mounds, plazas, boundaries, and gates. The strongest revisionist perspective comes from Claudine Payne and John F. Scarry, who survey influences on Florida, traditionally considered on the margin of the Mississippian world. Their inventories reveal few mounds but a great number of plazas among Timucuans and other highly stratified chieftainships well documented in the colonial era. Other areas on the periphery of the central heartland also qualify, if plazas are the primary consideration. Ultimately, Lewis and Stout conclude that "the architectural grammar of the Mississippian towns was more the effect of social and economic changes, a kind of cultural weather vane, than it was a causal factor in those changes" (p. 232).

By the end of this book, the reader is left with an excellent summary of the architectural space of the Mississippians and can agree that there is a common grammar if not an agreed-on syntax in the interpretation of material and spiritual realms that drove these societies toward urbanization and simultaneous colonial control of hinterlands. What is also unclear is the variety of uses of plazas. If any single plaza should solve this puzzle, one might assume that the Grand Plaza at Cahokia would hold the key. Using electromagnetometry, one team discovered many "borrow pits" under Cahokia's plaza, holes in which earth was excavated for use in building mounds and terraces. Scattered pottery fragments and different types of "fill" material used to flatten the surface suggest that plazas may not be reliable indicators of the built landscape at Cahokia and, by implication, elsewhere in the Mississippian world.(n37) In short, what transpired at ground level may never be fully recoverable, but what lies in the mounds continues to perplex and surprise the archaeological world.

A recent massive slump in 1994 on the second terrace of Monk's Mound led to a salvage effort to understand why the engineers at Cahokia would go to the impractical trouble of constructing this second tier.(n38) The conclusions of James M. Collins and Michael L. Chalfant follow the formulation of Bruce G. Trigger, originally an Egyptologist, now recognized as one of the leading experts in North American archaeology and ethnohistory. Trigger's "thermodynamic" explanation seeks to place monumental architecture worldwide in a conceptual grid. His thesis is the following:

the ability of individuals or groups to engage in conspicuous consumption demonstrates their control over nature, while their ability to appropriate other people's labour and compel them to work harder becomes the basic symbol of power over other human beings.(n39)

Large, tall, labor-intensive structures may not always make sense in terms of energy and material inputs, but impractical as they may seem, most civilizations have gone to great effort to build them. Trigger's model of authoritative control of mind and matter is in sharp contrast with that of an egalitarian world of hamlets, farms, and ceremonial centers. A very recent discovery, announced in 1998 as "Cahokia Surprise," is a 32-foot layer of stone 140 feet into Monk's Mound, located 40 feet beneath the surface on the Second Terrace. How large an area the stones cover is unknown. William Iseminger, a curator at Cahokia Mounds, believes the stone layer to be some kind of ritual platform. That the closest source for such stones is 10 to 15 miles away implies massive labor in bringing the rocks to the city and supports Iseminger's hypothesis.(n40)

A final recent book that paves the middle ground between the materialist/ economic school and that of a symbolic/ideological interpretation is John E Scarry's anthology, Political Structure and Change in the Prehistoric Southeast.(n41) This collection reminds us that human societies are dynamic and that there is no exact mold for explaining Mississippian political structure. While we may come to know the cities they built from the ruins that are left, we need to recognize that chiefdoms arose, declined, vanished, and sometimes reemerged, but that the cities are not likely to reveal this information on the surface of material remains.

Perhaps it is much more than mere coincidence that Thomas Jefferson was highly influenced by the mound builders when he planned and executed the building of his grounds at Poplar Forest and his Indian Hall at Monticello.(n42) As Roger Kennedy proclaims, these "founders of American architecture" left an indelible legacy on the land and beneath the rich alluvial bottom lands that they cultivated and worshiped on. It is a legacy that any student of urban North America ought to acknowledge and one that will continue to attract energy and talent among scholars.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Since this article was written, a new anthology has been released that provides comparative data and context on the urban Southeast with the urban Southwest. It already has become a valuable addition to the literature under discussion here. See Jill E. Neitzel, ed., Great Towns and Regional Polities in the Prehistoric American Southwest and Southeast (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).

(n1.) Henry Marie Brackenridge, "On the Population and Tumuli of the Aborigines of North America. In a Letter from H. H. [sic] Brackenridge, Esq. to Thomas Jefferson--Read Oct. 1,1813, Baton Rouge, July 25, 1813' Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series 1 (1818): 151-9 (quote on pp. 154-5).

(n2.) The history of Cahokia is best constructed by Melvin L. Fowler, "The Cahokia Site" in Fowler, ed., Explorations in Cahokia Archaeology (Illinois Archaeological Survey Bulletin 7, rev. ed., 1977), 1-30.

(n3.) Brackenridge, "On the Population," 154-5.

(n4.) J. Thomas Scharf, History of Saint Louis City and County: From the Earliest Periods to the Present Day, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1883), 1: 100.

(n5.) Bruce G. Trigger, "Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian" American Antiquity 45 (1980): 662-96. For a popular summary of America's fascination with this subject, see Robert Silverberg, Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (Greenwich, CT, 1968); and Stephen Williams, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory (Philadelphia, 1991).

(n6.) On the image of the Plains Indian, this point has been best expressed by John C. Ewers, "The Emergence of the Plains Indian as the Symbol of the North American Indian," Smithsonian Institution Report for 1964 (Washington, DC, 1965), 531-44, revised and reprinted in Ewers, Indian Life on the Upper Missouri (Norman, OK, 1968), 187-203. Also see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1979).

(n7.) Brochure, "Towns and Temples," Minneapolis Museum of Science and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, "Towns and Temples Exhibit," 1981.

(n8.) These chronologies are very generalized. Adena overlapped with Hopewell. See James B. Griffin, "Eastern United States" in R. E. Taylor and Clement W. Meighan, eds., Chronologies in New World Archaeology (New York, 1978), 62-6. On the gap between Hopewell and Mississippian chronologies, see Michael Coe, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson, The Atlas of Ancient America (New York, 1986), 55.

(n9.) William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York, 1966); John L. Allen, Passage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Urbana, IL, 1975); Donald Jackson, Thomas Jefferson & the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello (Urbana, IL, 1981); James P. Ronda, Astoria and Empire (Lincoln, NE, 1990); Ronda, "Exploring the West in the Age of Jefferson," in John L. Allen, ed., A Continent Comprehended, vol. 3 of North American Exploration (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 9-74.

(n10.) E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, DC, 1848).

(n11.) Cyrus Thomas, Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1890-1891 (Washington, DC, 1894), reprinted, introduction by Bruce D. Smith (Washington, DC, 1985), 7.

(n12.) Roger G. Kennedy, American Churches (New York, 1982); Kennedy, Greek Revival America (New York, 1989).

(n13.) Bruce G. Smith, "Hopewellian Farmers of North America" (paper presented at Plenary Session, Eleventh Congress, International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, September 1987, Mainz, Germany), 65.

(n14.) See Fowler, "The Cahokia Site," 1-30, and Nelson A. Reed, "Monk's and Other Mississippian Mounds" in Explorations in Cahokia Archaeology, 31-42; Thomas E. Emerson and R. Barry Lewis, Cahokia and the Hinterlands: Middle Mississippian Cultures of the Midwest (Urbana, IL, 1991); and Coe et al., Atlas of Ancient America, 56-7.

(n15.) Many definitions of Mississippian have been offered. Earliest definitions focused on the distribution of a certain type of pottery in the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries. Sec William H. Holmes, "Ancient Pottery of the Mississippi Valley," in Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1882-83 (Washington, DC, 1886), 367-436. Following extensive work at Cahokia by William H. Moorehead in the 1920s, new definitions went beyond pottery style to include rectangular, wail-trenched houses and flat-topped pyramidal mounds. See Thorne Deuel, "The Application of a Classificatory Method to Mississippi Valley Archaeology," in Fay-Cooper Cole and Thorne Deuel, eds., Rediscovering Illinois (Chicago, 1937), 207-19. An early synthesis of the meaning of Mississippian that remains useful is James B. Griffin, "Culture Periods in Eastern United States Archeology," in Griffin, ed., Archeology of Eastern United States (Chicago, 1952), 352-64. Griffin considered the appearance of pyramidal earthen mounds and associated "plaza complex," elaboration of social organization and more extensive use of agriculture, as well as other evidence of Meso-American influences the keys to the new Mississippian culture. Reinforcement of the importance of temple mounds and townhouses, plazas, and intensive "agricultural village life" as well as elements "derived from Middle American sources" was offered by Gordon R. Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology (Chicago, 1958), 163-4. On the expanded aspects of economy, political organization, social structure, and ideology, see Griffin, "Changing Concepts of Mississippian Cultures of the Eastern United States," in R. Reid Badger and Lawrence A. Clayton, eds., Alabama and the Borderlands: From Prehistory to Statheood (University, AL, 1985), 40-63; John F. Scarry, "The Nature of Mississippian Societies" in Starry, ed., Political Structure and Change in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States (Gainesville, FL, 1996), 12-24 (quote on p. 13).

(n16.) Griffin lists the commonalities for Mississippian societies in "Changing Concepts," 63. The literature on the significance of American Bottom archaeology and its relationship to the advancement of archaeological theory beyond the Cahokia site is extensive. Specific anthologies reporting advances in research include Melvin L. Fowler, ed., Perspectives in Cahokia Archaeology, Illinois Archaeological Survey Bulletin 10 (Urhana, IL, 1975); Fowler, "The Cahokia Site" 1-30; Charles J. Bareis and James W. Porter, eds., American Bottom Archaeology: A Summary of the FAI-270 Project Contribution to the Culture History of the Mississippi River Valley (Urbana, IL, 1984). The best summary of research on Cahokia from 1977 up to 1990 is Robert L. Hail, "Cahokia Identity and Interaction Models of Cahokia Mississippian," in Emerson and Lewis, Cahokia and the Hinterlands, 3-34. On archaeological models and concepts, see Bruce D. Smith, ed., Mississippian Settlement Patterns (New York, 1978); Badger and Clayton, Alabama and the Borderlands: From Prehistory to Statheood; David H. Dye and Cheryl Anne Cox, eds., Towns and Temples along the Mississippi (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1990); Daniel J. Rogers and Bruce D. Smith, eds., Mississippian Communities and Households (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1995); Michael J. O'Brien and Robert C. Dunnell, "A Brief Introduction to the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley," in O'Brien and Dunnell, eds., Changing Perspectives on the Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1998), 1-30.

(n17.) Lynne G. Goldstein, Mississippian Mortuary Practices: A Case Study of Two Cemeteries in the Lower Illinois Valley (Evanston, IL, 1980), 13-6.

(n18.) No exact number of Mississippian towns extant in prehistoric North America has been offered by leading scholars owing to the loss of hundreds if not thousands of major and minor sites to farming, development, and changes in river channels. The first extensive scientific survey of the Mississippian temple mound towns was conducted by Cyrus Thomas for the Bureau of Ethnology as that newly formed organization's first major project in the 1880s and 1890s and was released as "Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of American Ethnology," in Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, DC, 1894). Thomas mapped and explored "over 2,000" mounds, including many pre-Mississippian or Hopewell-Adena sites. For a general view of the demography of Mississippians, see George R. Milner, "Mississippian Period Population Density in a Segment of the Central Mississippi River Valley" American Antiquity 51 (1986): 227-38. Estimates for Cahokia alone have ranged from 500 to 50,000 people. Many texts now have a round number of up to 30,000 as a middle ground. Michael L. Gregg suggested 25,000 in an important article in 1975. See "A Population Estimate for Cahokia," in Fowler, ed., Perspectives into Cahokia Archaeology, 126-36. Architectural historian William N. Morgan, in Prehistoric Architecture in the Eastern United States (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 55, suggests 15,000 at A.D. 1250 with "probably twice that number in nearby towns, villages, and hamlets" for a total of 45,000." Curators at the Cahokia Mounds World Heritage Site present the visitor with a brochure (Cahokia Mounds, n.d.) with the statement that Cahokia's population "approached as many as 40,000 people" Recent reevaluation of the evidence led Timothy R. Panketat and Neal H. Lopinot to conclude that Cahokia's highest population was somewhere near 10,000 people. See "Cahokian Population Dynamics" in Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas R. Emerson, eds., Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln, NE, 1997), 103-23.

(n19.) The work of Christopher S. Peebles and Susan M. Kus at Moundville on the Black Warrior River in Alabama has been especially useful as a comparison from another large urban center. See Christopher S. Peebles and Susan M, Kus, "Some Archaeological Correlates of Ranked Societies" American Antiquity 42 (1977): 421-48; Peebles, "Determinants of Settlement Size and Location in the Moundville Phase" in Smith, Mississippian Settlement Patterns, 369-416; "Moundville from A.D. 1000 to 1500 as Seen from A.D. 1840 to 1985," in Robert D. Drennen and Carlos A. Uribe, eds., Chiefdoms in the Americas (Landam, MD, 1987), 21-41.

(n20.) Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1986); Gary B. Nash et al., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society (New York, 1986); Norman K, Risjord, A History of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1988); and James Kirby Martin et al., America and Its People (Glenview, IL, 1989). The text by Nash contained the lengthiest and most interesting vignette on the role of archaeology in reconstructing urban history, a tradition repeated in subsequent editions.

(n21.) John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1994), 3.

(n22.) "The Ancestors," part one of 500 NATIONS, Jack Leustig, producer. Los Angeles: 500 Nations Productions and Time-Warner Entertainment Company, 1994, 1995.

(n23.) The symposium was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1968 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Papers subsequently were collated by Melvin L. Fowler as the aforementioned Explorations into Cahokia Archaeology.

(n24.) J. Patrick O'Brien, "Urbanism, Cahokia, and Middle Mississippian," Archaeology 25 (1972): 188-97; V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (New York, 1951); "Civilization, Cities and Towns," Antiquity 31 (1957): 6-38.

(n25.) J. Patrick O'Brien, "Cahokia: The Political Capital of the 'Ramey' State?" North American Archaeologist 10 (1989): 275-92.

(n26.) O'Brien's view is echoed by Peter N. Peregrine, Mississippian Evolution: A World System Perspective (Madison, WI, 1992).

(n27.) J. Patrick O'Brien, "The 'World-System' of Cahokia within the Middle Mississippian Tradition" Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 15 (1992): 389-417.

(n28.) Bruce D. Smith, "Mississippian Expansion: Tracing the Historical Development of an Explanatory Model," Southeastern Archaeology 3 (1984): 13-32; Also see Bruce D. Smith, ed., The Mississippian Emergence (Washington, DC, 1990).

(n29.) These were a 1972 session of the Society for American Archaeology organized and chaired by Melvin L. Fowler and a 1973 symposium organized by Robert L. Hall at the Central States Anthropological Society. Most papers remain unpublished from these sessions.

(n30.) The session was organized by Thomas E. Emerson and was held at the 1983 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Pittsburgh. Papers appeared in Emerson and Lewis, Cahokia and the Hinterlands.

(n31.) Emerson and Lewis, "Preface" in Emerson and Lewis, Cahokia and the Hinterlands, x.

(n32.) Emerson's doctoral work is the database for his views. See "Settlement, Symbolism, and Hegemony in the Cahokian Countryside" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995).

(n33.) Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, "The Ideology of Authority and the Power of the Pot" American Anthropologist 93 (1991): 919-41. 34. Pauketat and Emerson, Cahokia.

(n35.) "Mississippian Towns and Central Places Symposium" held at the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, St. Louis, 1993.

(n36.) O'Brien and Dunnell, Changing Perspectives.

(n37.) George R. Holley, Rinita A. Dalan, and Philip A. Smith, "Investigations in the Cahokia Site Grand Plaza," American Antiquity 58 (1993): 306-19.

(n38.) James M. Collin and Michael L. Chalfant, "A Second-Terrace Perspective on Monk's Mound" American Antiquity 58 (1993): 319-32.

(n39.) Bruce G. Trigger, "Monumental Architecture: A Thermodynamic Explanation of Symbolic Behaviour," World Archaeology 22 (1990): 19-32.

(n40.) "Cahokia Surprise," Archaeology 51 (1998): 25.

(n41.) Scarry, Political Structure.

(n42.) This theme was first explored by Kennedy in "Jefferson and the Indians" Winterthur Portfolio 27 (1992): 105-21, in which he argues that Jefferson built his Poplar Forest residence near Lynchburg, Virginia, with a circular mound embodying the ideal relationship of man to the landscape on the basis of what he learned about the ancient mounds of the Ohio Valley, especially those at Circleville, Newark, Mariette, and Chillicothe, Ohio. Also see Joyce Henri Robinson, "An American Cabinet of Curiosities: Thomas Jefferson's Indian Hall at Monticello" Winterthur Portfolio 30 (1985): 41-58.

~~~~~~~~

By William R. Swagerty, University of Idaho