American History Hit - Cahokia: The Medieval Mississippian City

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Nearly a thousand years ago, America's first city appeared in the Mississippi flood plain. Don finds out about a day in the life of Cahokia, what its vast mounds were used for, and why it is so poorly remembered nowadays.Our guest is Timothy Pauketat, archaeologist and author of several major books about Cahokia. His latest book is called Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America.Editing and sound design by Stuart Beckwith. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's a thousand years ago, and a bald eagle soars over what is referred to nowadays in southern Illinois as the American bottom. Imagine yourself in flight.

You fly west beyond the prairie towards the Mississippi River. The landscape below transforms from wilderness to turned soils and tilled fields. Lofting over a ridge, you see burial mounds below. The great flat floodplain spreads itself wide. The land becomes a patchwork of fields, farms, and small houses. On the distant horizon, there's a confluence of great rivers. The Illinois, the Missouri, uniting with the Mississippi. Giant water glittering in the sun.

And there is a city, a teeming settlement, a sight to be seen. Smoke plumes through the air. Music is heard on the wind. The place is built by design. its great plazas and thoroughfares laid out to mirror the celestial order of the sky. Massive earth and structures tower over them, topped by decorative ceremonial buildings. Other giant mounds are still under construction, with trains of laborers hauling and dumping basketfuls of soil and rock. It is peaceful. It is grand. It is industrious.

It is an ordinary day in America's first city. Welcome to Cahokia. Hey, everybody, I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. Anyone who's traveled to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico or anywhere else in central and South America has likely encountered the stone and earth structures of complex pre-Columbian societies, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Inca, being a few of the most famous names. But it's surprising to many modern Americans that while those fabled civilizations rose and

fell throughout those lands to the south, another major culture took hold up here in the north. It, too, was advanced and widespread, largely distributed throughout the central and southeastern regions of what is today the United States. It is called the Mississippian culture, after the Great River running through it. This advanced civilization lasted for some 800 years, and at its height developed what could be called a major metropolis, defined by great earth and structures, many of which still stand within the Cahokia Mounds state historic site, located 10 miles east of St. Louis in southern Illinois. I've been there.

I've been to Cahokia and can attest to its grandeur. Hand-built of soil and rock, the great mounds are numerous and massive. The biggest one, Monk's Mound, stretches over a 14-acre site and stands 100 feet tall, the largest prehistoric earth and structure in the Americas north of Mexico. It is breathtaking, especially if you quote, quickly climbed to the top for a look around. And it's all a very big story, Cahokia and the culture that built it. And today we are joined by the renowned anthropologist, archaeologist, and author Timothy Pocateat, whose latest book is Gods of Thunder, how climate change,

travel, and spirituality reshaped pre-colonial America. Welcome, Tim, to American History. It's a real honor to have you on. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. To be clear about the basics, we're talking about what span of time when we talk about Cahokia. We're talking about 900 AD to about 1350, although really the critical year is 1050 when it becomes urban in its proportions. Yeah, this is centuries before European contact. And when we talk about a civilization, it's always a loose term, this is a large and vast area of, like I said, in the opening, a big part of the United States. These are many, many different kinds of people who share cultural. traits. We lump them into a group called the Mississippian culture. Is that fair to do in your mind?

Yeah, yeah. I think what's lost, sometimes when we describe things as Mississippi and is the fact that there was a big history there as well. So Cahokia actually is an early Mississippi place. And there are more later Mississippian ones that pop up across the South after Cahokia collapses. Geographically and geologically, I suppose, this is located on what's called a fascinating term, the American Bottom. What does that mean? The American Bottom is a floodplain of the Mississippi River. So it's a wide patch of level ground where Mississippi, especially before Corps of Engineers built levees, used to always flood and fill backwaters annually. There's a number of so-called bottoms that people have named along the Ohio and the Mississippi. This one has the name American

because of its colonial history, where prior to the foundation of the United States, It's 1776. There was French and English, and at some point, somebody looked back to the one side of the floodplain and said that was American as opposed to French or English or whatever. It's interesting how later generations need to manage all of this idea of ancient societies and attach names that we can categorize easily. But it's also the confluence of waterways. I mean, this is not only the Mississippi, but not too far away as the Missouri, the Illinois River. that must have had a lot to do with this as well. For sure, both in economic terms, but also in terms of the way people related to water differently than perhaps we do today.

And so the fact that there were these major rivers and other water features in that region was critically important in a cultural sense. Another thing about the Midwest that many people on the East and West Coast don't really know about is the amount of cave systems that are in these areas. The limestone of the ancient sea that used to be there creates these cave systems, which are very important to those societies. I mean, I remember many explorers on television through the Mayan caves down in Belize, especially and elsewhere. This was a very important spiritual aspect of life. It was. And, you know, for archaeologists, we've tended to overlook that, especially for the Cahokia region, in part, again, because of this colonial, early American history when those cave systems were all. oftentimes closed off and filled up in the 1800s.

And so we haven't thought too much about them. But one of the reasons, Cahoki is where it is, is almost certainly because there were caves, especially under one section of this sprawling urban complex. It was the equivalent of heaven, the underworld. Jilbalba is how the Mayan culture called it. So we have fertility from the American bottom, not unlike the Nile plain in Egypt.

We have a spiritual center, thanks to the presence of these cave systems. We have water transport. We have a lot of water. All of this is an attractive amalgam of factors that brings people to this area. What kind of population are we talking about when we talk about Cahogia?

When it is converted into an urban complex, which is around 10.50 AD, we're talking about the core area of upwards of 20,000 people living in a more or less urban environment. and then another 40, 50,000 living outside in farming areas, you know, within 30, 40 miles of that core. So it's respectable in terms of early civilizations. How big does it get eventually? That's the biggest.

At the very beginning is the biggest. 20,000 is probably a good guesstimate for the largest it is at the core. And again, another 50,000 outside, so 70,000 people coming and going and I don't. identifying with this place is a good maximum estimate. This all takes place in a climatic era called the medieval warming period, which I find fascinating. I've never heard this term before talking to you. What does that mean? It is the climatic name for, sometimes it's called the medieval climate anomaly.

It's for 500 year or so stretch of time where the northern hemisphere was, generally speaking, warming because of up to that time a lack of volcanic activity. so the climate had warmed. And it is what underwrites the medieval period in Europe. And so in Europe, it's a cultural name. Around the northern hemisphere, it's also used as a climatic descriptor. In the American bottom or the Cahokia region, you see temperatures rose probably a degree or two Celsius, which is actually quite a lot, enough that they could start growing really bountiful corn crops.

And then also around the American bottom, it got a little wetter, in a more predictable way. So the rains would come more often and a little bit more than they were used to getting, which was important for corn crops as well. Not everywhere around the northern hemisphere experienced the exact same kind of warmer, wetter conditions. Certainly like in Mesoamerica, the Maya, it was the opposite. It was drought. And that was not good. But the opposite happens to the north, and that's one of the reasons why we are able to get something like Kohokia. And has a lot to do with the civilization thriving there because you could create large stocks of food. Let's talk about the layout of the city. First of all, it's not called

Cahokia, obviously. That name comes from a modern sensibility, right? That's a borrowed name from one sub-tribe of a larger tribe. It's unclear how many of them were involved, but that's certainly a more recent name from the 1600s. The Cahokia sub-tribe had a community nearby. In fact, there's also a modern city called Cahokia, which is nearby, and that's named directly after that a historic location. The layout of the city, how similar to Mayan cities in terms of the plazas and the pyramids and so forth? I've heard Mayanists say, or other Mesoamericans say, boy, it really looks Mesoamerican. And the similarities are all in the fact that it's cosmically aligned and that there are segments that are aligned to different cosmic or

celestial bodies. So it's diverse in a way, but there's still a sense. order. The central order is tied to the Milky Way primarily, but also the sun and the moon, this one main axis. And yet another part of the city called East St. Louis today, but another part is aligned to something else that we haven't been quite able to figure out, that there is this basic design that is built on top of a cosmic alignment is very Mesoamerican. Also very Maya-like, but also like some other sites in the southern Mississippi Valley is the fact that they use causeways to establish formal processional avenues through the city and also to reaffirm those cosmic axes. I have to just explain to anyone who has not been there, and I hope everyone does go there at some point.

It so expands the mind in terms of American history, really, and how far back and how developed this place really was before Europeans even arrived. These mounds, especially, as I said, monk's mound are huge and the result of enormous human labor to carry basically soil and rock into these areas. What was the function of these mounds? I suppose there were many different functions. Primarily, there was one, and there are two basic kinds of mounds. One's rectilinear, just square often, and then the other is circular. Both of these were flat-tapped. Some of the old artist depictions tend to show one as conical as if it's a burial mound. But what we know now is that they're both flat-topped platform mounds. On top of them would have been temples, houses of

important people, and other support buildings or big storage houses. And probably one particular corporate group or family clan maybe was responsible for one mound. And their most important buildings and their religious temples, as I said, would have been on top of that one. mound. And again, very Mesoamerican-like, the kinship was still important. And there might have been one mound that was more important than the rest, Monk's mound, the big one. But that was still that family's mound more likely, or a noble house, if you will, of kind. So they're almost all platform mounds. Some of these are converted at the end of their family's history to become burial mounds. But that's usually the final episode of using a platform mound. I suppose the most

basic symbolism of one of these mounds would be a mountain, right? This would be the creation of a large, powerful summit. But this is in the middle of an area that even in those days, of course, was not mountainous at all. Well, I guess you could go over to Illinois and find some, but generally speaking, this is a pretty flat area of the world. So building a mountain there would give someone on top an extreme sense of superiority and power. If it didn't do so at the beginning, if that wasn't the intention, and we're not sure that that was the intention, I think that might have been a result of the mound growing through time. It's a fact that some of the earliest constructions, the earliest stages of these mounds were sometimes fairly small, a foot or two. And so the idea

was as much about having purified earth in a location where important buildings could be in an unpolluted, not contaminated by the ordinary surroundings, ordinary residential areas, to establish that place and it mattered less that it was high, I suspect anyway. But they did grow. They kept adding earth more and more through time to most of these platforms. And so they grew high. The 100-foot-high mounds mound probably started off as 20 foot high, maybe 30. And then seven or eight major constructions later, it's 100-foot high.

So at some point, there are over 200 earth and mounds. This is like the skyscrapers of New York City at the time. would be an extraordinary thing to see coming into this city. And at that point, as you said before, the population is somewhat around 15, 20,000 people. So I want to try something. I've always thought about this, and I think you're the expert who can help me. I want to imagine a day in the life of a citizen of this settlement at its height. So Tim, what am I seeing? Give me the visuals of the landscape. Let's start 20 miles out or so. And you could start either from the west or the east and walk into the center. And what you'll be seeing as far away as 20 miles out already is cleared forests and then you're at the edge of the prairie of the Illinois prairie.

So you'd be walking through mixed prairie and some forest and cleared forests and interspersed among all of this would be to your right or to your left a family farmstead. Either direction. In fact, you could probably see several from any vantage point. Occasionally, as you kept walking then, say you're now 15 miles. you'd hit a larger settlement, like a village of farmers. The houses would look like 15 feet long, 10 feet wide, fatched roof huts in a way. And they're not very big. Be about the size of a small living room today.

Inside is mostly for sleeping. So mostly people will be working outside of these houses. So you'd see families and kids running around doing their daily tasks coming and going from their fields. These fields, are they very ordered? Was this a complex farming society? Yes, especially when you get near the city. That is probably at 20, 50 miles out, you're looking at scattered fields. You may not perceive an order. They're going to be more willy-nilly and maybe some having a brush growing back in them because they're letting them lie fallow for a while and they're farming some other patch of an acre or two to your right or left. However, once you get to about five or less, maybe three miles from the city, you're at the edge of an escarpment. Before you get into the floodplain itself, you are in what sometimes we call the uplands. It's just rolling hills, and that's where you've been for the last few miles. But now you reach the edge of the floodplain, and it's an escarpment. It's a hundred foot high drop-off. It's a zone that would have been used for

burials. So this is not something you'd see much activity in at all. You, in fact, might see some scaffolds where bodies have been laid out to decompose. You'd certainly see some burial mounds right along the bluffs, which is the name for this escarpment. And then you would drop down into the floodplain if you kept walking. And you could probably at that point already see Cahoki in front of you, which would have been kind of a smoky, blurry sense of there's a lot of houses over there. And you'd see the mounds as well. You'd see these massive structures. You'd see the massive structures and the big mounds. As soon as you drop into that floodplain, it's likely that you're entering big fields of Cahokia.

And those would have been organized, I would think. And we don't know this, but the city is certainly organized. They probably would extend that sense of order into this large fields of the city itself. There you'd see farmers coming out of the city, going to the fields working and then going back to their houses, you know, at the edges of this city. Growing, I imagine, maize, grains of all sorts. What was the typical diet like for these folks? It was pretty diverse. especially in the early Mississippian, so it's not just corn. Corn actually they eat more of later in time,

1400s, 1500s. Cahokia was important, but they also ate local starchy seeds that were grow like weeds, so Kenoponium and Amaranth and Maygrass and sumpweed. These are names that now farmers call these weeds. They spray to kill them, but they're good food crops and they're rich in nutrients. So those would be made into stews. Also, what you'd have seen usually growing with the corn would have been a good number of squash and pumpkins. And we know that because those things show up at these feasts. And that's a staple of any feast, cucurbitz, you know, squash and pumpkins. And supplementing all of this would have been a steady diet of fish, other aquatic animals. Waterfall, especially in the fall and spring, you know, with Mississippi flyaway,

hundreds of thousands of birds fly through there. Again, a rich, diverse diet. So people are there because of the good land. It's fertile land to grow in. They're also there to sell their product or at least trade their product, I suppose, within what I suppose are marketplaces. Inside the city, is there, by the way, a wall of some kind? Is there a defining element to the city? There was a wall later.

So for the first 150 years of its existence as a city, no wall. It was probably too big to have a wall. You would be cutting people off if you tried to build a wall. And so that was probably a bad idea. And they didn't need it. There were no competitors or threats that could probably take on Cahokia for that early part of its existence. That changes a little before 1,200. And walls do go up around both courtyard areas, certain special people built little walls,

and then around the main sites themselves, Cahokia being the big one. Yes, they had a huge wall after 1150, a little before 1,200 that took 20,000 logs to build and had bastions. It's clearly defensive. But by then, things were going downhill. I mean, they were struggling already. And then by then, there were competitors out there to the north and south, probably people who were related to Cahokians. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. We're about to witness the first coronation at Westminster Abbey in 70 years.

And gone medieval from history hit is your perfect companion for the event. From the earliest English coronation records. To what the royal regalia used in the so many means. From the surprising origins of the recognition part of the service. To the lavish banquets that took place afterwards. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. And on gone medieval in April, we'll be exploring the medieval origins of this feast of pageantry.

We'll try to pick out the key moments for you to watch and trace their origins back into the mists of time. We've got some great guests and fascinating topics to lift the lid on a moment when, let's face it, people all around the world will have gone medieval. Subscribe and follow Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. There was a lot of travel in those days,

people migrating and moving back and forth, correct? Yes. A Cahogia is built by migrants. We know based on pottery and other measures that 30% of the people are clearly migrants throughout the history of that place. People keep coming in and then going out. It's probably more than 30%. We just can see it in the pottery, about 30% of the pottery. But most day in, day out, most of these people are farmers, 90% farmers. And whether they're living in the city itself, in a neighborhood, and there were neighborhoods,

or whether they were living out in a farmstead, 10 miles out. Mostly their days are tending the gardens or tending the fields. A whole lot of farming, as any farmer knows, especially if you're doing it by hand with a hoe, weed those gardens every day. How was this society organized? Are we talking about sort of clans or is this more of like a serfdom in terms of serving a power base? Cahokia is again early. So whatever they do is they're doing it for the first time. So it's not necessarily class based in the beginning. In fact, it's unlikely that it is. It's more this big, cooperative, giant community, experiment in community, probably. And I'm sure they reached and exceeded the limits, you know,

of what that meant they could do. So we don't know the governance of Cahokia. I think most people would guess it's some kind of council of leaders, probably, I'm sure occasionally, a particular person would emerge as a strong leader within some kind of council of kin-based corporate membership. Later in time, later Mississippian folks, mostly to the south, in the Gulf Coast and the Appalachia region and southern Mississippi, yes, there's more class-based. In part, we know that because of the early European descriptions. There you clearly had more extractive kind of feudal-like relationships, noble, commoner kinds of relationships. It's less clear for Cahokia. Was there a elite part of town where people living in the finer houses?

Yes, all around the main plaza of the Cahokia precinct itself. Now, mind you, there were two other major precincts just down the road connected to this major precinct of Cahokia. And I mentioned East St. Louis. And there's also one in St. Louis. You know, you could see them, one from the other. But it's big and sprawling with farmers all kind of mixed in the edges. But in those precincts, that's where the elites would have their big houses. A lot of storage buildings. Not that many people because you're looking at the elites, of course, are controlling all of this. They don't necessarily want a whole lot of people hanging around. Those peasants, there's a Beverly Hills everywhere, isn't there? So once I've passed that wall, let's go later on, and we've walked through that wall, what am I seeing around me? What is activity like in the town? Well, the wall would have been the inner sanctum of the town. So I think once you pass through the wall, a lot of ordinary activity ceases. And you'd be lucky to get into that inner sanctum. And I would imagine there'd be guards there first off.

You just don't want ordinary animals and people wandering around endlessly because it's a sacred space. The huge plaza would be the thing that you would see right in front of you. And it's almost 50-acre plaza. And this is a constructed space. You know, it's perfectly flat. And that naturally it would have been an undulating floodplain. But it's been flattened. Special buildings and big, upright, special marker posts.

lining the edges, maybe some in the middle, big public buildings, sometimes next to, certainly on top of the core pyramids, the platforms within that wall. And then something that did not exist, and there's no evidence for it. You mentioned it is a market as far as we know. This was not a commercial hub. You know, you don't go inside to trade. It's more likely that kind of thing It was happening all around outside, in the houses of people, not an organized centralized market, but a more decentralized, hey, can you help me out here? I need some corn. And that exchange would happen between families, more likely.

So it would have been an exceptional moment for me to even be in the city if I was not one of those priests or some sort of personality like that. There were big sporting events, am I right? That's true. So on special occasions, I do think, yes, the doors would be thrown open, so to speak, and people would come in for big festivals. That would take place in that plaza. And part of those festivals then would have been gaming. And a particular game that Cahokia really adopted

and made the official sport is later called Chunky. And it's known as Chunky from the plains into the south in the 15, 1600s. Describe the game for me. How are you playing? The main gaming piece is a circular stone disc like a hockey puck that's meant to be rolled on its edge. About the size of the palm of your hand

or a little bit bigger. Carefully made out of some of the same. selected meaningful stone from down the Mississippi River, generally speaking. And then the players, it could have been two players or two teams, would have special throwing sticks, almost javelin-like things that would be thrown at the rolling stone. The idea was that one team or one person would be the roller. They would be responsible for throwing that stone across the plaza, and then both his or her team, and then the other team members would be throwing their throwing sticks at the rolling disc to try to get next to it or as close as you can, if not stop it by hitting it.

It's a difficult game to play it. I've tried it. Not many people play it today. I know some southern indigenous folks occasionally play it. It's tough. On television, of course, because they have to have the host do something active in these places. I was taught how to play that game. And it is hard. It's hard to throw that spear for one thing. I remember that whole deal. I didn't know the rules. So what was I doing? So as I spend my day at Cahokia, And let's assume it's a festival. There must be thousands of people in the streets here. Like anything today, a July 4th, whatever.

This is one of those kinds of days. It would have been because of something celestial, I imagine. Priests up above on the mountaintops. I'm just picturing it all in my head, which you must have done a hundred times in your life. Yes. And the post priests would be the keepers of the schedule. You know, they would know when the important convergences of the harvest,

the cosmic movements into heavens, the social calendar. They would know when those dates were, and people would look to them for that kind of information. And they'd also be the ones, of course, running the main ceremonies inside. And so it's a good bet that there are, just like today, descendants have ritual calendar, and there's a certain day the community gets together and they celebrate something a little later. It's a hire of a ceremony, a little later, it's something else. Probably you're looking at just several annual, generally warm weather festivals like this. And yes, you're looking at 10,000 people in that plaza, participating, watching.

And that plaza was built to hold that many people. Really, it's larger than most Mesoamerican city plazas. It's a big hike to go around this place, not only to go up and down the structures, but also just to walk it. It's a vast, vast area. So as day shifts tonight, one fascinating piece of archaeology that was discovered there is the rubbish pit that was found in the center. proof of feasting. When we talk about a feast, what are we saying here? People aren't literally eating at a buffet or anything like that, right? No, I think we are talking about kind of a potluck-style buffet,

especially as you approach dinner time, I would think. In part, I say this because of having attended such festivals in Oklahoma myself, you know, the big meal is coming up and people cook in their families or in their clans, and you'd have multiple cooks, multiple pots of whatever, everything from stews and roasted meats to roasted fish and berries and greens, all of this being cooked up, probably family by family of their family. And so the festival would turn into a social event where, and again, I'm basing this on what still happens, people visit each other. And as the night goes on, you keep eating and you eat around, your friends, you catch up

with people, you know. So I think if you could think it was a mega potluck, that's probably the way to think of it. And then the pots themselves, after the festivals, you can see in this, because we have excavated this big pit that you mentioned, that they're broken and thrown away after the festival's over with. So it's just pots or it's just jammed into this pit from a particular festival. It's so interesting to me, just as a sidebar, how much of our society, I mean, of course, in your world, this is a no-brainer. But those of us who don't think all the time about this sort of thing, how much we are tied to the development of agriculture and the settlement of society because of that. And then the reliance on climate, understanding the climate through the celestial bodies, you can basically just draw a straight line through all of that to, you know, what constitutes religion. And in a way, governance.

All kinds of stuff really roots itself back to how do we grow these crops and rely on their fertility. that's kind of everything, isn't it? Yeah, and I think it's important to appreciate that part of the sensibilities of these early agriculturists were looking to crops. I mean, they would live with crops. And it wasn't that they were just growing them strategically to make surplus. But it was a way of living that entailed connections with other things out in the outside world. Sun and the Moon.

Those are important predictors of when do I plan? Like, well, what phases the Moon in? and then what time of year is it? Being an agriculturalist in that way ties you to the larger cosmos, even if you're not trying to be tied to the larger cosmos. I was fascinated by the woodhenge that was found offsite there. Talk to me about the excavation of this. This is basically a circular formation of posts that was used as a kind of sundial, right? Yeah, probably as much a lunar calendar as well, because it's a circle of posts that was rebuilt repeatedly. Different numbers of posts, but always multiples of 12.

So they look to be counting the months, and using those posts to mark particular months as well. That turns out is now a late version. There are woodhanges that go all the way back to Poverty Point in Louisiana that dates to 16,500 BC or so, we now know. So this is a very traditional structure that has later counterparts in the plains, like the Sundance. In fact, there may be a direct connection between Kohokia's Woodhenge

and the Sundance rituals out on the plains. In any case, the circle creates a big open ceremonial space that people could meet in, have certain kinds of rituals that maybe aren't held over in the big plaza. And this is kind of on the outskirts of the core of the city. It's not really outside the city, but not in the exact middle of it either. They used red cedar poles to build it with, which is a sacred wood, very aromatic, long-lasting wood. And that Sun Circle was built and rebuilt over about 100 years. So a priest would stand amidst that circle and be able to read where the sun was at any given time?

What was the purpose and function? That's an important part of at least one construction. It's a central post, and yes, you could stand behind it and mark the solstices and the equinoxes on the horizon, probably both the rise and the set, as well as counting the lunar months as you go, and then as well as having important festivals inside of it. That's not a real difficult thing to observe. I mean, we can all do it. solstices. Like, okay, yeah, it's the solstice there. The sun's way down to the south or north.

But it's the theater of it. Going through the ritual and having the right word said at the right time is what makes that ability to observe it in the moment, you know, so important. Well, that's the governance aspect to it. You know, once you have an authority who knows what's happening through the year and can advise and schedule, you have someone who's in a position of power. I mean, it's not a bad thing. I'm just saying that that really does centralize authority in a way so that people are relieved of that challenge themselves, especially if they're digging in the fields every day of their lives. It's very difficult to keep track of things. So here are this priest structure who takes care of that problem for you. And thus you have the

beginnings of a more centralized society. How much was the Cahokia and the Mississippian culture responsible for the complexities of later societies that come? Cherokee, Osage, these acknowledged groups of people who had a more advanced Native American community there. The two groups you just mentioned and many others are descendants of the Mississippians. So they would not exist the way that they exist today. And they do have complicated social, political structures still, except for the fact that Cahokia happened and then this big kind of diaspora or like the spread of this civilization follows Cahokia, for sure. And interesting to contrast that with out west. You have more nomadic hunting tribes

who are reliant on Buffalo and that kind of way of life, who do not gather in great numbers as much as the Eastern type. And you have really the beginnings of the East West, even today. It sort of feels that way that there's a denser population, therefore more complex societies. Yeah. However, the Eastern Plains groups are also affected dramatically by the fact that Cahokia and other Mississippian folks were there. because Cahokians did reach out to other people, in part because they were trying to figure out who were they relative to this wider world and the cosmos as well. So they would make forays out. Sometimes I'm sure they were just for trading expeditions.

I'm also sure there were religious movements or expeditions, let's call them, where they were just going to seek knowledge. We know this in part because these sites exist up in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Don, Louisiana. and then up the Missouri, there are some Cahokian contact sites. We say, oh, there's got a bit of a Cahocan was here. And then even if it's a small contact, short-term episode, it's still made a big historic difference. And so some of the plains rituals, maybe many of them, are derived probably from the Mississippians. It's amazing.

It's worth reflecting on the fact that this is kind of a golden age. You're talking about 1,000 AD, a golden age of mankind in a way. There's not a lot of warfare, right? Not a lot of conflict. No need to create massive military structures or big walls. The evidence seems to indicate that people were living a very peaceful life even within the community. And we see what has developed, this remarkable thing that influences later generations. That does start to break down in the 1200s.

Yeah, exactly. What happens? I think Kohokie is successful. And they proselytize and create this whole new world. And competitors emerge. And those competitors think that they're the Kohokians or that they're the Kohokians or that they have certain rights that maybe the Cahocans are claiming on the river. And so you get raiding and you get walls going up and you can see this all the way up into southern Wisconsin and you can see

it downriver as well. And we're not sure who's fighting whom or how frequently it is, but it's happening. And it gets severe. In the eastern plains and the late 1300s, it's brutal conflict. It's almost stereotypical plains warfare as emerged by that point. And that expands down into the South as well. And so when DeSoto moves through, he plays one native town off another native town because they already hate each other. So that's how he moves through the south. Has there been a big change in climate? Has that had anything to do with this downfall? Good point. Yes, the medieval warm period, this nice, calm, warmer, wetter environment is changing in through the 1200s by 1300. It's pretty much over. And you're entering the little ice age. And that's a general shift,

Instead of getting moist Gulf Coast air masses with rains, you're getting more northern systems coming across, and then those two meet, and we're getting the more dramatic rainfall events, like kind of we're familiar with now. You can get flooding. You can get droughts. Those two systems don't meet wherever you are. And generally speaking, there's less rain, and it turns colder. And so it becomes more difficult to grow things the way they had been growing them.

Always leads to bad things when you can't grow things right. It's telling to me, certainly to me, growing up in New Jersey, I'd never even heard of Cahokia until I was in my 30s or 40s, which is extraordinary. This is true of many, many Americans that we don't think back beyond the John Wayne movies in terms of understanding Native American structures and so forth. When Europeans came to this land and they began to encounter these societies, how did they see these? How did they interpret what they had found? The scholars among them, the disciples of Thomas Jefferson, let's say, they understood that this was a complicated Native American set of societies. It didn't take long. That generation passed.

And by the 1820s, you're into a whole different kind of political environment in the United States. And it's very racist. And it's all about removing Native Americans from their lands. And they're driven out, as most of your listeners will know. And it's ugly. And so then there's a denial that sets in sort of a. an academic denial, sort of a structural denial, just not thinking so much about the fact that Native people were as complicated and as sophisticated as any people. And that denial oddly lasts

well into the 21st century. And it's still, there's little bits of it. You can pick up occasionally and somebody's not being very cautious about how they describe something here or there and an archaeologist. I guess we're all used to living with this and struggling to purge this, but that definitely allowed us to forget that there was this really important native history. Never got written in the textbooks. So when you were young, it was not there because of this long biased history. It is biased. It is racist. There's also the ignorance factor. And a lot of that is corrected by good folks like yourself, archaeologists who come along and start piecing this all together and realizing what really was there. And that's a pretty modern phenomenon. But he's a

Even back then, the Europeans who came over were thinking that these were signs of lost tribes of Israel. You know, it was always a European lens that they were seeing this. Yeah. Some knew that they were pushing an agenda of dispossession. They knew that. And there was pushback, maybe a romanticized pushback early on. The Enlightenment period, people like George Rogers, Clark or Thomas Jefferson were still guilty of bad things. But had their ideology continued a bit more, it would have turned out.

differently and better, I think. Maybe I'm romanticizing Thomas Jefferson a little bit here, but there was tension early on in the accounts, and there was arguments going back and forth between these folks about what do these mounds mean and who built them and what should we be doing, you know, with native communities. We haven't mentioned whether there are large amounts of these settlements elsewhere in the continental United States. Can you find these mounds all over the Midwest? Mound building was common all over the Midwest, all over eastern United States, Canada down to Florida. Not Mississippi and mound building, however. A Mississippi mound building is restricted more to the central Mississippi Valley down into the deep south.

A lot of the other mound building is burial mounds, which has just a deep history. And it goes down in the Mesoamerica as well. Would these people have gone down there and seen what the Maya had done? I think so, yes. And that's the basis of this most recent book. A, it's really logical. I mean, these were travelers. And they didn't have modern sensibilities. And they had other reasons for seeking knowledge that would entail travel. But there's also little clues. There are similarities that are tough to deny. Some copies of Mesoamerican things show up in the north, especially at Cahokia. So Cahokia, of course, when you have a city like that, they have the ability to fund an expedition, which is different from just somebody maybe like, okay, I'm going to go travel and maybe I'll

come back or maybe I'll be killed when I'm away. But Cahokians could have mounted an expedition. And I imagine that's what they're doing. So much of what came up from Mexico was institutionalized, if you will, over that period of time, those several hundred years, built and cultivated, and then becomes its own engine for that which becomes later tribes that we have labeled our, in modern terms, Cherokee, Osage, and so forth. It's a really interesting cauldron, if you will, if you go to this place and walk among these mounds and see where it was all really created. The book is called Gods of Thunder, How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality, reshaped pre-colonial America.

The author is Tim Pocket. Thank you very much, Tim. Next time, we're going to talk about burial mounds, I promise. Okay. Well, you're most welcome. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it.

Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.