Cahokia

Cahokia PDF Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143117475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
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.

Cahokia

Cahokia PDF Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143117475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Cahokia, the Great Native American Metropolis

Cahokia, the Great Native American Metropolis PDF Author: Biloine W. Young
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
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.

Cahokia Mounds

Cahokia Mounds PDF Author: William R. Iseminger
Publisher: Landmarks
ISBN: 9781596297340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Description of archaeological site known as the Cahokia Mounds in western Illinois.

Feeding Cahokia

Feeding Cahokia PDF Author: Gayle J. Fritz
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817320059
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview offarming 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.

Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians

Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians PDF Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521520669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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

Journey to Cahokia

Journey to Cahokia PDF Author: Albert Lorenz
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 9780810950474
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Published in association with The Art Institute of Chicago, this title relates the tale of a young Native American who is chosen to make a trading journey from his small village to the great mound city of Cahokia that existed in America's midwest more than 600 years ago. Full color.

Cahokia Mounds

Cahokia Mounds PDF Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190289139
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Just a few miles west of Collinsville, Illinois lies the remains of the most sophisticated prehistoric native civilizations north of Mexico. Cahokia Mounds explores the history behind this buried American city inhabited from about AD 700 to 1400, that was almost lost in metropolitan expansions of the 1960s and 1970s, but later became one of the best understood archeological sites in North America.

Cahokia

Cahokia PDF Author: Sally A. Kitt Chappell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226101361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
At the turn of the last millennium, a powerful Native American civilization emerged and flourished in the American Midwest. By A.D. 1050 the population of its capital city, Cahokia, was larger than that of London. Without the use of the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, its technology was of the Stone Age, yet its culture fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture. The model for this urbane world was nothing less than the cosmos itself. The climax of their ritual center was a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acre rising a hundred feet into the sky—the tallest structure in the United States until 1867. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of this six-square-mile area in the central Mississippi Valley from the Big Bang to the present. Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages? To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present. Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.

Cahokia and the Hinterlands

Cahokia and the Hinterlands PDF Author: Thomas E. Emerson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
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.

People of the Morning Star

People of the Morning Star PDF Author: W. Michael Gear
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466832290
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Award-winning archaeologists and New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear begin the stunning saga of the North American equivalent of ancient Rome in People of the Morning Star. The city of Cahokia, at its height, covered more than six square miles around what is now St. Louis and included structures more than ten stories high. Cahokian warriors and traders roamed from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. What force on earth would motivate hundreds of thousands of people to pick up, move hundreds of miles, and once plopped down amidst a polyglot of strangers, build an incredible city? A religious miracle: the Cahokians believed that the divine hero Morning Star had been resurrected in the flesh. But not all is fine and stable in glorious Cahokia. To the astonishment of the ruling clan, an attempt is made on the living god's life. Now it is up to Morning Star's aunt, Matron Blue Heron, to keep it quiet until she can uncover the plot and bring the culprits to justice. If she fails, Cahokia will be torn asunder in warfare, rage, and blood as civil war consumes them all. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.