The consolidation of this symbolism into a rural cult marks the expropriation of the cosmos as part of the increasing power of the Cahokian rulers.

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.

Covering topics as diverse as economic modeling, craft specialization, settlement patterns, agricultural and subsistence systems, and the development of social ranking, Cahokia and the Hinterlands explores cultural interactions among Cahokians and the inhabitants of other population centers, including Orensdorf and the Dickson Mounds in Illinois and Aztalan in Wisconsin, as well as sites in Minnesota, Iowa, and at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Proposing sophisticated and innovative models for the growth, development, and decline of Mississippian culture at Cahokia and elsewhere, this volume also provides insight into the rise of chiefdoms and stratified societies and the development of trade throughout the world.

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.

About one thousand years ago, Native Americans built hundreds of earthen platform mounds, plazas, residential areas, and other types of monuments in the vicinity of present-day St. Louis. This sprawling complex, known to archaeologists as Cahokia, was the dominant cultural, ceremonial, and trade center north of Mexico for centuries. This stimulating collection of essays casts new light on the remarkable accomplishments of Cahokia.

In Truth and Power in American Archaeology, archaeologist and ethnohistorian Alice Beck Kehoe presents her key writings where archaeological fieldwork, ethnohistorical analysis, postcolonial anthropology, and feminist analysis intersect to provide students and scholars of anthropology an overview of the methodological and ethical issues in Americanist archaeology in the last thirty years. Truth and Power in American Archaeology brings together Kehoe’s broad-ranging, influential articles and previously unpublished lectures to explore archaeology’s history, methods, concepts, and larger imbrication in knowledge production in the West. With her contextualizing introductions, these articles argue for recognition of scientific method in the historical sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and geology; empirically grounded understandings of American First Nations’ ways of life and scientific knowledge; discussion of archaeology as expanded histories; a view of American archaeology’s social contexts of Manifest Destiny ideology, Cold War politics, and patriarchy; and a postcolonial historicist understanding of America’s real deep-time history and of the imperialist racism entrenched in mainstream American archaeology.

Somethings turned up at a road construction site in Alton, Illinois. A pair of skeletal remains is causing a sensation in the local papers, and it falls on archaeologists Daniel and Lauren French to determine whether the project can go forward. But when further study turns up dozens of graves, each containing female remains, an ordinary dig turns into a major archaeological expedition. Then things really start to get weird.An underground student-anarchist cell is determined to stick a monkey wrench in the operation by using stolen artifacts as weapons to halt progress. Local Native Americans charge the researchers are desecrating a burial site. And two students hatch a maniacal plot to ruin the Archeology Departments reputation with a charge that could ruin one researchers career forever.Now, Daniel and Lauren are faced with failure just as theyre on the cusp of an incredible discovery that would change our archeological knowledge forever. Who were these women, and what do they tell us about ancient beliefs, culture, and even migration patterns? The answers might be too incredible to believe...Spanning the continents and the ages, Witches of Cahokia is a thought-provoking novel that will keep you guessing right up to the shocking conclusion.