The city of Cahokia, which was one of the most powerful cities in North America before European colonization, has neither disappeared mysteriously nor suddenly, according to the latest findings of anthropologists. Something to shatter a little more received ideas about the past of an exceptional Amerindian city.
An artist's impression of the town of Cahokia, which was one of the largest Native American cities in North America around 1100 AD. It is located in the southwest of the present state of Illinois, in the United States.
ARCHIVE. From 2018, Sciences et Avenir had asked anthropologist A. J. White of the University of California (Berkeley) about his work analyzing feces to gauge the size of an ancient population, in this case that of the pre-Columbian site of Cahokia, in North America . On Monday, January 27, this researcher and his team published in a publication that additional observations shed new light on the history of the site.
At its height, around the 12th century AD, Cahokia was one of the largest cities in North America, a land still untrodden by Europeans. It will take almost 600 years for another city, Philadelphia, to reach the same size in the territory of the United States. However, today, the one that housed the highest pyramids in the Mississippi, in what is now southern Illinois, is closer to a simple dented glade than a majestic archaeological site (nothing to do with Teotihuacan, cradle of the pre-Columbian civilization where, a few centuries earlier, the largest pyramids of the whole continent also stood). Of the Amerindian Cahokia, there is indeed not much left, the real estate developers and the builders of highways having completed, until the 1960s, to destroy its already dilapidated vestiges by time.
Make people talk... about excrement
Unfortunately, there are even fewer written traces of the history of the Cahokians, who are unfamiliar with the notion of archives. It is therefore not surprising that fantasies steeped in colonialism clumsily shed light on the many gray areas of the history of this society. One of the strongest beliefs concerns their decline, which is placed around the year 1400. After several centuries of economic, cultural and religious domination over much of the central United States, legend has it that the 20,000 souls of Cahokia – Native Americans farming, fishing and trading – suddenly disappeared before the arrival of settlers.
During "Midwest" and autochthonous to the myth of the lost colony of Roanoke, this mysterious evaporation was gradually explained by a succession of floods, periods of droughts and an inexorable depletion of resources. A less sensational version of the story that a team of researchers led by the University of Berkeley, California, has just chipped away at a little more. In the magazine American Antiquity , the anthropologist and lead author of the study A.J. White reports that after analyzing human fecal stanols (see box below), fossilized pollen or even charcoal, he and his collaborators were able to establish that Nor had the inhabitants of North America's most iconic pre-Columbian metropolis "suddenly deserted" their weakened city.
ARCHIVE. From 2018, Sciences et Avenir asked anthropologist A. J. White of the University of California (Berkeley) about his work analyzing feces to gauge the size of an ancient population, in this case that of the pre-Columbian site of Cahokia in North America. On Monday, January 27, this researcher and his team published in a publication that additional observations shed new light on the history of the site.
At its height, around the 12th century AD, Cahokia was one of the largest cities in North America, a land still untrodden by Europeans. It will take almost 600 years for another city, Philadelphia, to reach the same size in the territory of the United States. However, today, the one that housed the highest pyramids in the Mississippi, in what is now southern Illinois, is closer to a simple dented glade than a majestic archaeological site (nothing to do with Teotihuacan, cradle of the pre-Columbian civilization where, a few centuries earlier, the largest pyramids of the whole continent also stood). Of the Amerindian Cahokia, there is indeed not much left, the real estate developers and the builders of highways having completed, until the 1960s, to destroy its already dilapidated vestiges by time.
Make people talk... about excrement
Unfortunately, there are even fewer written traces of the history of the Cahokians, who are unfamiliar with the notion of archives. It is therefore not surprising that fantasies steeped in colonialism clumsily shed light on the many gray areas of the history of this society. One of the strongest beliefs concerns their decline, which is placed around the year 1400. After several centuries of economic, cultural and religious domination over much of the central United States, legend has it that the 20,000 souls of Cahokia – Native Americans farming, fishing and trading – suddenly disappeared before the arrival of settlers.
During "Midwest" and autochthonous to the myth of the lost colony of Roanoke, this mysterious evaporation was gradually explained by a succession of floods, periods of droughts and an inexorable depletion of resources. A less sensational version of the story that a team of researchers led by the University of Berkeley, California, has just chipped away at a little more. In the magazine American Antiquity , the anthropologist and lead author of the study A.J. White reports that after analyzing human fecal stanols (see box below), fossilized pollen or even charcoal, he and his collaborators were able to establish that the inhabitants of North America's most iconic pre-Columbian metropolis had not "suddenly deserted" their weakened city.
Faecal stanols, reliable indices of human presence. These organic molecules produced in our gut when we digest food (especially meat) can remain, once released in our feces, stored in layers of sediment for thousands of years. Difficult to confuse them with animal stanols:humans produce them in much larger quantities. They can therefore be used to assess major changes in the population of an area.
A quasi-continuous presence until the 18th century
"It has always been thought that Cahokia was a ghost town at the time of first contact with Europeans, at least according to what the archaeological record suggests" , says A.J. White in a press release. "But we managed to reconstitute in the region an Amerindian presence that lasted for centuries." Enough to undermine "the 'myth of the endangered Indian', which has always favored the weakening and disappearance of Amerindians [after the arrival of Europeans] rather than their resilience and persistence" , assures the researcher.
Thus, their results demonstrate that after a historically low population threshold reached around 1400, Cahokia experienced a second wave of Native American settlement in the 1500s, which marked the beginning of a stable presence until the 1700s. It really wasn't until this time that migration, war, disease, and environmental change got the better of Cahokian society."The history of Cahokia is much more complex than, 'Goodbye Native Americans, Hello Europeans'" , White quips."And our study uses innovative evidence to demonstrate this."
Corn cultivation and human sacrifices
The observations of the anthropologist and his team have also made it possible to confirm the little information we have about the way of life of the Amerindians of Cahokia. They practiced the cultivation of corn, the hunting of bison and the controlled burning of their fields. In the late 1960s, what remained of speculation was confirmed by the discovery of huge piles of human bones:Cahokians also engaged in ritual mass murder, as well as ceremonial burials. In 1967 was notably discovered under mound 72, excavated by a team of archaeologists, the remains of more than 250 people, probably sacrificed in honor of two high-ranking men placed in the center of the burial and whose remains were found richly adorned.