Synopsis
Book by None
Extrait
Biloine W. Young
A Day in Cahokia–AD 1030
Biloine (Billie) Young lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is involved there in a number of cultural and civic activities. She is also the founder of Centro Colombo Americano, an educational and cultural center in Cali, Colombia. Among her published books are Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis; Mexican Odyssey: Our Search for the People’s Art; A Dream for Gilberto: An Immigrant Family’s Struggle to Become American; and Three Hundred Years on the Upper Mississippi. In this essay Billie Young takes an imaginary journey to the Mississippi River metropolis of Cahokia in the summer of 1030. It is an unforgettable experience.
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A Day in Cahokia–AD 1030
One of the first discoveries made by the Spanish who came to the New World following Columbus was that the Americas were filled with people living in advanced civilizations. Cortez and his men were astounded, in 1519, at the sight of the Aztec Tenochtitlán, a city of 300,000 that was larger, cleaner, and more efficiently managed than any in Europe. The sight was so extraordinary that the superstitious soldiers thought they had been enchanted “on account of the great towers and pyramids and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry.” Houses, shaded with cotton awnings, were “well made of cut stone, cedar, and other fragrant woods, with great rooms and patios, all plastered and bright.”
The Europeans would have been even more amazed if they had known that five hundred years earlier the Indians of North America had also established a metropolis–a planned urban center housing tens of thousands. Located on the American Bottom, where the Missouri, the Illinois, and the Kankakee rivers flow into the Mississippi, the Indian city we call Cahokia culturally dominated a densely populated region from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Rockies to the Appalachians. Cahokia was based on corn agriculture, a compelling belief system, and a trading network that spanned half the continent.
Cahokia is unique in North America because of its geographic reach, the skills of its builders and astronomers, and the sophistication of its culture. Cahokia is one of the few places in the world where a complex level of social organization evolved without the impetus of outside conquest or diffusion. Strangely, the Toltecs of Mexico, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, and Cahokia have almost identical trajectories. All rose and fell at the same time but only the Toltecs were preceded by another complex civilization. Because the Anasazi left buildings of stone their culture may appear to have been more sophisticated than that of Cahokia. It was not. The Cahokia phenomenon was much greater.
Cahokia dominated the heart of North America for approximately four hundred years–from ad 900 to 1300. Yet the city had been abandoned for two centuries when the first Europeans arrived. Settlers saw only hundreds of mounds, some—despite centuries of erosion—still as high as ten-story buildings. They found it hard to believe these massive structures could have been built by the despised Indians and so theorized they had been constructed by someone else—the Spaniards, perhaps, or the Vikings or descendants of Canaanite refugees from Palestine!
Not until the second half of the twentieth century did archaeologists grasp the full extent of Cahokia—a Native American metropolis larger than any other city in North America until Philadelphia eclipsed it in 1800, a city whose downtown covered six and a half square miles with suburbs extending another fifteen miles in all directions, a city that was a destination for worshipping pilgrims.
While Cahokia was flourishing in North America, London and Paris were still villages, Ethelred II was bribing the Danes to cease their raids on England, Leif Eriksson was finding his way to Newfoundland, and the Visigoths and Moors were battling for control of Spain.
If I could visit Cahokia, I would choose to be present on the day in approximately 1030 when a great chief, his retainers, and his servants were buried at the site modern–day archaeologists have labeled Mound 72.
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The air is humid, so saturated that the first rays of the sun cast a defused light over the landscape. I am standing on the bank of a river that drains over half the continent and for a moment the backlit rising mist gives the appearance that water and sky are one. Here, at its midpoint, the river flows steadily south through a mile-wide maze of islands, sloughs, eddies, and backwaters.
The stillness that greeted the rising of the sun is broken by the calls of hundreds of birds taking flight from the marshes. Turtles slip off floating logs into the water, fish break the surface to strike at hovering insects, and muskrats drop with distant splashes into the river. Though the sun has barely risen above the horizon, its heat is already oppressive.
To my left is the valley of the great river and to my right, in the far distance, is the escarpment of the vast eastern prairie. Between them lies a flat crescent of land, ten miles wide at its widest point and eighty miles long from north to south. This fertile bottomland is the cradle of Cahokia.
Other sounds now come from the river—the rhythmic strokes of canoe paddles, dipping and pulling through the water in measured cadences. Emerging through the mist, ghostlike, a fleet of a dozen high–prowed canoes, each carrying forty or more individuals, appears. The canoes move swiftly upriver toward the mouth of a smaller stream that empties into the river near where I am standing. Each canoe in the line makes the right turn into the smaller stream, heading northeast, and soon they have passed me by and are out of sight.
I am not alone. My companion is a youth, Anton, who is acting as my guide. We are among a throng of hundreds who, though it is still early in the morning, are striding purposefully toward Cahokia along this wide road topping the ridge bordering the stream. I had stepped aside to watch the passage of the canoes and to survey the landscape, but now I rejoin the crowd, jogging to catch up with Anton and his companions.
A short distance from where the stream empties into the river we come to some of the most dramatic features of the landscape— enormous mounds, rising like giant breasts on the flat land. The first group is a cluster of forty-five arranged in a semicircle over a mile in diameter. Anton laughs at my frustration as I try to estimate the size of the mounds—each one several hundred feet around its base, many bearing buildings on their summits. The tops of some of the mounds have been flattened into what look to be parade grounds so large that, if so ordered, hundreds of men could execute maneuvers on them.
Cahokia, Anton explains, has men who are mathematicians, engineers, and materials specialists whose task it is to design and supervise all construction. Once a mound is designed and its location approved by the priests, everyone participates in its building, carrying basket load after basket load of soil to the site. Anton points to one of the mounds and tells me his relatives helped build it.
There is tension in the air and Anton makes no attempt to hide his excitement. Drums have been beating for many days, he tells me, hunters have brought food for thousands to the city, and enormous storage pits of grains have been opened in preparation for the ceremonies that will soon take place. A powerful chief has died and today he will be buried. The leaders of Indian communities for hundreds of miles up and down the river, along with their retainers and nobles, have come to Cahokia to participate.
Some will have brought tribute to be interred with the fallen leader—a politically significant acknowledgment of Cahokia’s dominance over the region.
The men around me wear brightly colored tunics of woven cloth and the women short skirts wrapped around their waists. Many of the garments are ornamented with pink and white shell beads so finely crafted that it takes twenty-four hundred beads to fill a quart measure. All wear leather foot gear and most carry packs of provisions on their backs. Many of the men also carry spears, bundles of bows and arrows, and deerskin pouches filled with arrow points. A few wear long capes embroidered with thousands of beads and these individuals are treated with respect, bordering on reverence, by others.
Around us the bottomland is planted in corn mingled with varieties of tomatoes, beans, squash, and peppers, the vines of the beans twisting around the cornstalks in an exuberant embrace. Punctuating the fields are occasional houses, the walls made of sticks sunk into the ground and plastered with mud and straw. The steeply pitched roofs are covered with mats of thatch. Paths, like long stems, connect the houses to the road on which hundreds of us are now walking.
As we pass one field Anton steps to the side and picks two tomatoes. Plucking off the stem, he hands one to me with a grin and sinks his teeth into the other. I take a bite and we stride on, juice dripping off our wrists.
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Canoe landing areas, broad leveled sections of stream bank, appear frequently. Just ahead of me a line of laden canoes pulls up at the bank. People of all ages disembark, hand up bundles of cargo, and then stand together in groups, waiting until everyone is ashore before continuing the journey. The high pitch of their voices betrays their anticipation. At a signal from a leader, they move off.
We come upon more mounds, spaced at regular intervals, fires blazing on their summits, that form a ceremonial entrance to the city. I turn off the road onto a path leading to the summit of a mound to get a better view and there, lying before me for as far as I can see, are the tightly packed residences of Caho...
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