Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi

by Timothy R. Pauketat

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143117475
• ISBN13: 9780143117476
• Release Date: July 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

American ancient metro by Mississippi

Timothy wrote this book to bring attention to this ancient American great city on the Mississippi north of Mexico. Archeologist and anthropologist with their digging and research revealed the secrets on the lives, community and culture and artifact on this city residents. Large scale of human sacrifice was unearthed. He traced the influence of Cahokia Indian throughout the area in "chunkey" in Alabama, Carolina and Mississippi. Moreover, Cahokia Indians built a good number and size of earth pyramids and mounds. Climbing to the top of Monk Mound gives a good bird eyes' view on the settlement especially the Twin Mounds. The back page of this book used the word "prehistoric". Does it mean pre-Columbus as prehistoric? Who came to this beautiful continent before Columbus and developed sophisticated culture and civilization when Europe was still in Dark Ages? Tim did a good job in this easy to read text on this ancient metro in a lost civilization we all shared in American heritage.

Cahokia

Excellent book bringing some new information about this important place in the past of the Midwest

A very good resource on Cahokia

Starting somewhere around 1050 AD, the small Indian village of Cahokia suddenly rose up to be the center of a great North-American culture, perhaps the only great culture in pre-Columbian North-America. Not a great deal is known about the culture that Cahokia led, as it had already fallen by the time that European explorers and missionaries arrived. In this little book, anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat explains all that is truly known about Cahokia, and how it was found out. Overall, I found this to be an interesting book, as long as you don't expect too much from it. By its small size, you know at a glance that it is not going to tell you too much. My biggest complaint is that I do wish that the author had spent more time putting what is known about Cahokia into the context of what is known about North-American native culture in general. I feel that this would have drawn a fuller picture of Cahokia. However, I must admit that this would have required a certain amount of speculation and assumption by the author, and he clearly wanted to avoid that in this book. Another complaint against this book is that it contains no illustrations at all, and that is a shame. Certainly images of what the author was describing would have helped in understanding things. But, that said, much of what the author did talk about really did not require illustrations. I believe that the author did succeed in what he wanted to accomplish, and that is to pen a book about what it *known* about Cahokia, avoiding unnecessary and untenable speculation. I found the book informative and interesting to read, even if it was a little limited in its scope. If you want to really understand Cahokia, then I would highly recommend that you get this book, it is a very good resource.

A Spellbinding Book

Pauketat is an archeologist of the Cahokia site, a 1000 year old native American city opposite present day St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi River. This book provides an excellent introduction to Cahokia and to the Mississippian culture. The author presents current anthropological theories and archaeological data in this single account. Written for the general reader, the book brings considerable scholarship to a fascinating topic. Pauketat places Cahokia in a large regional context and incorporates the history of the site both as a living center and the largest and most important Native American city north of Mexico. Pauketat's writing is far from a dry recitation of archaeological fact and trivia. He holds the lay reader's attention with his descriptive ability. Whether he is describing life as it was in this great city, explaining the game of chunkey or crediting Preston Holder, Melvin Fowler, Warren Wittry and others who were a part of the earlier generation of archaeologists of Cahokia, the narrative is not merely adequate, but spell-binding. I highly recommend the book for general readers and specialists, alike.

Mounds of mystery

Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin's Library of American Indian History) I am a lay reader and know very little of archeology, but I have a special affinity for Cahokia. In 1967 my friend and I camped at what was then Cahokia Mounds State Park and were able to observe close-up a dig then in progress, with helpful explanations provided by the lone archeologist on-site. It seemed so painstaking, performed with fine instruments and brushes and, in so far as we could see at the time, it uncovered only shards and fragments. Back then archeologists still had not grasped much of the significance of the site as it is now understood. At one time they believed it to be a ritual center, occupied only briefly by a few inhabitants. It is now known to have been a major eleventh- and twelfth-century populous urban center supported by surrounding farms, an early example of a government-sponsored urban renewal, a culture that marked a radical transformation in the history of indigenous Americans. Well-told non-fiction accounts of archeological enterprises can draw in readers much like a good mystery, and Timothy Pauketat displays something of a novelist's touch here (although do not expect "Indiana Jones"). He recounts dozens of discoveries, generally in sufficient detail for readers to evaluate for themselves the evidence the archeologists were accumulating. Pauketat, himself a noted archeologist of the Cahokia site, clearly admires many of his predecessors and he gives us enough information about several to add an appealing human element to the narrative. What most fascinates me is the breadth and detail of what archeologists are able to infer from what they find. Consider some of the more remarkable findings from Cahokia, the skeletal remains of females buried in groups in mounds and showing signs of violence (one such sign being clenched hands and feet, indicating spasms at the time of death). Many of these women seem to have been from someplace else, not Cahokia, based on their dental morphology and bone characteristics. Via isotope studies bioarchelogists can tell something about the women's diet (generally different than that of Cahokians), and they even venture judgments about the women's beauty based on their bone characteristics. These findings form one large piece of a body of evidence that enables the archeologists to conclude that notable features of Cahokian society included human sacrifice, political theater, and social inequality. Sometimes the inferences can go too far, beyond the evidence. It seems to me, for example, that Pauteket is not on very solid ground in some of his speculations about the purposes or effects of the ritual sacrifices (although he is careful to present them only as possibilities, not certainties). Of course not all of the mysteries of Cahokia are solved, including such major ones as where the people came from, why they disbanded (around the end of the twelfth century), and