1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [150]
Reconstructions of Cahokia, the greatest city north of the Río Grande, ca. 1250 A.D.
Because the slab had to stay moist, it must have been built and covered quickly, a task requiring a big workforce. Evidence suggests that people moved from miles around to the American Bottom to be part of the project. If the ideas of Pauketat, the University of Illinois archaeologist, are correct, the immigrants probably came to regret their decision to move. To his way of thinking, the Big Bang occurred after a single ambitious person seized power, perhaps in a coup. Although his reign may have begun idealistically, Cahokia quickly became an autocracy; in an Ozymandiac extension of his ego, the supreme leader set in motion the construction projects. Loyalists forced immigrants to join the labor squads, maintaining control with the occasional massacre. Burials show the growing power of the elite: in a small mound half a mile south of Monks Mound, archaeologists in the late 1960s uncovered six high-status people interred with shell beads, copper ornaments, mica artworks—and the sacrificed bodies of more than a hundred retainers. Among them were fifty young women who had been buried alive.
Woods disagrees with what he calls the “proto-Stalinist work camp” scenario. Nobody was forced to erect Monks Mound, he says. Despite the intermittent displays of coercion, he says, Cahokians put it up “because they wanted to.” They “were proud to be part of these symbols of community identity.” Monks Mound and its fellows were, in part, a shout-out to the world—Look at us! We’re doing something different! It was also the construction of a landscape of sacred power, built in an atmosphere of ecstatic religious celebration. The American Bottom, in this scenario, was the site of one of the world’s most spectacular tent revivals. Equally important, Woods says, the mound city was in large part an outgrowth of the community’s previous adoption of maize.
Before Cahokia’s rise, people were slowly hunting the local deer and bison populations to extinction. The crops in the Eastern Agricultural Complex could not readily make up the difference. Among other problems, most had small seeds—imagine trying to feed a family on sesame seeds, and you have some idea of what it would have been like to subsist on maygrass. Maize had been available since the first century B.C. (It would have arrived sooner, but Indians had to breed landraces that could tolerate the cooler weather, shorter growing seasons, and longer summer days of the north.) The Hopewell, however, almost ignored it. Somewhere around 800 A.D. their hungry successors took another look at the crop and liked what they saw. The American Bottom, with its plenitude of easily cleared, maize-suitable land, was one of the best places to grow it for a considerable distance. The newcomers needed to store their harvests for the winter, a task most efficiently accomplished with a communal granary. The granary needed to be supervised—an invitation to develop centralized power. Growth happened fast and may well have been hurried along by a charismatic leader, Woods said, but something like Cahokia probably would have happened anyway.
THE AMERICAN BOTTOM, 1300 A.D.
Maize also played a role in the city’s disintegration. Cahokia represented the first time Indians north of the Río Grande had tried to feed and shelter fifteen thousand people in one place, and they made beginner’s mistakes. To obtain fuel and construction material and to grow food, they cleared trees and vegetation from the bluffs to the east and planted every inch of arable land. Because the city’s numbers kept increasing, the forest could not return. Instead people kept moving further out to get timber, which then had to be carried considerable distances. Having no beasts of burden, the Cahokians themselves had to