This book examines the possibility and role of a Cahokian diaspora to understand cultural influence, complexity, historicity, and movements in the Mississippian Southeast. Collectively the chapters trace how the movements of Cahokian and American Bottom materials, substances, persons, and non-human bodies converged in the creation of Cahokian identities both within and outside of the Cahokia homeland through archaeological case studies that demonstrate the ways in which population movements foment social change. Drawing initial inspiration from theories of diaspora, the book explores the dynamic movements of human populations by critically engaging with the ways people materially construct or deconstruct their social identities in relation to others within the context of physical movement. This book is of interest to students and researchers of archaeology, anthropology, sociology of migration and diaspora studies. Previously published in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Volume 27, issue 1, March 2020

Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites. Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance. This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.

The fascinating story of a lost city and an unprecedented American civilization located in modern day Illinois near St. Louis While Mayan and Aztec civilizations are widely known and documented, relatively few people are familiar with the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico-a site that expert Timothy Pauketat brings vividly to life in this groundbreaking book. Almost a thousand years ago, a city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Built around a sprawling central plaza and known as Cahokia, the site has drawn the attention of generations of archaeologists, whose work produced evidence of complex celestial timepieces, feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of human sacrifice. Drawing on these fascinating finds, Cahokia presents a lively and astonishing narrative of prehistoric America.

Using a wealth of archaeological evidence, this book outlines the development of Mississippian civilization.

Critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns increase understanding of early Mississippian culture and society The reasons for the rise and fall of early cities and ceremonial centers around the world have been sought for centuries. In the United States, Cahokia has been the focus of intense archaeological work to explain its mysteries. Cahokia was the first and exponentially the largest of the Mississippian centers that appeared across the Midwest and Southeast after AD 1000. Located near present-day East St. Louis, Illinois, the central complex of Cahokia spanned more than 12 square kilometers and encompassed more than 120 earthen mounds. As one of the foremost experts on Cahokia, Susan M. Alt addresses long-standing considerations of eastern Woodlands archaeology—the beginnings, character, and ending of Mississippian culture (AD 1050–1600)—from a novel theoretical and empirical vantage point. Through this case study on farmers’ immigration and resettling, Alt’s narrative reanalyzes the relationship between administration and diversity, incorporating critical new discoveries and archaeological patterns from outside of Cahokia. Alt examines the cultural landscape of the Cahokia flood plain and the layout of one extraordinary upland site, Grossman, as an administrative settlement where local farmers might have seen or participated in Cahokian rituals and ceremonies involving a web of ancestors, powers, and places. Alt argues that a farming district outside the center provides definitive evidences of the attempted centralized administration of a rural hinterland.

Five centuries before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, indigenous North Americans had already built a vast urban center on the banks of the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. This is the story of North America's largest archaeological site, told through the lives, personalities, and conflicts of the men and women who excavated and studied it. At its height the metropolis of Cahokia had twenty thousand inhabitants in the city center with another ten thousand in the outskirts. Cahokia was a precisely planned community with a fortified central city and surrounding suburbs. Its entire plan reflected the Cahokian's concept of the cosmos. Its centerpiece, Monk's Mound, ten stories tall, is the largest pre-Columbian structure in North America, with a base circumference larger than that of either the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Nineteenth-century observers maintained that the mounds, too sophisticated for primitive Native American cultures, had to have been created by a superior, non-Indian race, perhaps even by survivors of the lost continent of Atlantis. Melvin Fowler, the "dean" of Cahokia archaeologists, and Biloine Whiting Young tell an engrossing story of the struggle to protect the site from the encroachment of interstate highways and urban sprawl. Now identified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and protected by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Cahokia serves as a reminder that the indigenous North Americans had a past of complexity and great achievement.