Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  Cahokia may have drawn people in with its political power, but the city was also a place where humans did extremely mundane things, like farm, hunt, maintain infrastructure, and raise families. When archaeologists excavate here, they mostly find objects that come from those kinds of human activities: broken hoes tossed aside, gnawed deer bones from dinner, broken clay pots, and the telltale deep post holes that mark the edges of somebody’s old wooden house. Still, the Cahokians created these everyday objects on a scale that was extraordinary for North America at the time. The city’s farmlands, which produced several kinds of fatty seed grains, as well as fruits, squash, beans, and corn, fed more than 30,000 people at the city’s height between 1050 and 1250. It would have been possible to walk roughly 19 kilometers from Monks Mound to the Mississippi River, take a canoe across, and continue walking for another several kilometers, without ever really leaving the city and its farms.

  The lost crops of North America

  Cahokia lies in a crazy quilt of ecosystems along the Mississippi River called the American Bottom. Rain and floods fill the area with seasonal ponds and swamps, while the surrounding bluffs give way to prairies perfect for growing food staples like maize and other starchy seeds. It is one of the most fertile stretches of land in North America, and Cahokians were well aware that they lived in a place so fecund it was practically magical.

  One of the most intriguing clay figurines we have from Cahokia is known as the Birger figurine, and it was discovered in an eastern outlying farming precinct called the BBB Motor Site (so called because it was uncovered during freeway construction). Found alongside other ritual materials, the Birger figurine is a deep reddish-brown flint carving of a woman farming on her knees, teeth gritted with effort as she wields a stone-and-wood hoe. But she does not till the land. Instead, her instrument cuts into the back of a serpent, its fat body coiled around her bent legs. In one powerful hand, the woman holds down the serpent’s head, which resembles a snarling bobcat. Behind her back, its tail branches into vines heavy with gourds. Clearly, she has already harvested some of the serpent’s bounty; strapped to the woman’s back is a woven basket full of squash.

  Washington University anthropologist Gayle Fritz describes showing the Birger figurine to traditional Hidatsa farmer Amy Mossett, who immediately recognized it as “Grandmother,” or “the old woman who never dies,” a powerful spirit who oversees the harvest.15 Here we see continuity between Mississippian beliefs and modern-day Siouan ones, as well as a sign that farming wasn’t just a job for Mississippians. It was a dangerous struggle to harness the power of otherworldly forces, as dramatic as any hunt or battle. At Cahokia, agriculture was part of an ongoing drama that involved life, death, and the cosmos.

  Unlike indigenous farmers to the south, the people of Cahokia didn’t plant maize until later in the city’s development. Instead, they ate domesticated North American plants like goosefoot, little barley, marshelder, maygrass, and erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed). These plants are sometimes called “lost crops” because they were once farmed intensively but have gone wild again. Cornell University archaeobotanist Natalie Mueller has spent several summers on a quest to track down the elusive remains of some of these lost crops, especially the one called erect knotweed.16 Growing along rivers in the United States now, it looks like an unremarkable, stalky plant, with bright, spoon-shaped leaves. But when Cahokia was founded, knotweed had undergone a thousand years of cultivation by indigenous people across the south. Generations of farmers had selected for knotweed whose seeds were large, thin-skinned, and grew quickly—much the way corn grows faster and bigger after millennia of selective cultivation. Mueller has found centuries-old caches of these plump cultivated seeds buried in areas where people lived in the Mississippian region.

  Domestic knotweed produced starchy, extremely hard seeds that had tough shells. To eat them, Mueller thinks, Cahokians cooked the seeds like popcorn in the embers of a fire, their tasty goodness popping out of the shells as they heated. Cahokians also could have used an ancient process called nixtamalization, in which they soaked erect knotweed in lime—the chemical, not the fruit—to turn it into a hominy-style porridge. Many indigenous groups in the Americas used nixtamalization to soften the hulls of maize before cooking, and it’s likely Cahokians would have known about the technique. When they weren’t enjoying popped knotweed, Cahokians might have eaten a thick, rich knotweed mush flecked with meat and spices. Knotweed and other lost crops formed the basis of a varied diet that combined fish and game with breads, porridges, oils, roasted nuts, stews, baked squash, and beans.

  Fritz, who previously described the meaning of the Grandmother figurine, has spent most of her career studying the cuisines of indigenous people in the American Bottom where Cahokia emerged. She recalls learning about Cahokian life by exploring a giant garbage pit next to Monks Mound.17 Digging through layers of debris, archaeologists found multiple layers of party goods, including swan bones and other barbequed animals, many kinds of seeds, shattered pottery, and even a layer of ants that likely came to feast before the refuse was covered with grass and burned. Fritz explains these are the remains of feasts from early in the city’s life, when Monks Mound was new. The wide range of food items, many tossed out when they were only half eaten, gives clues about how Cahokia fed its people. A lot of the food came from farms many kilometers away, at places like the BBB Motor Site, where Fritz and her colleagues identified evidence for intensive farming alongside small settlements full of Cahokian ritual items.

  The parties that filled the garbage pit, argues Fritz, also provide important hints about how city dwellers organized agricultural work and divvied up seasonal bounty. To reconstruct this complex social system, Fritz looks to plant remains as well as records from Europeans like Le Page du Pratz, who described monthly feasts among the Natchez, a large community of mound-building farmers in Mississippi in the 1700s. Both sources reveal a pattern where farmers brought harvests from the hinterlands into city centers for distribution during feasts. The question is: How was this distribution managed? Fritz argues that the Mississippians likely controlled land via kinship networks, the way the Hidatsa did, with many families sharing the same field. “American schoolchildren are taught that private, individual ownership of land was a concept foreign to Native Americans,” she writes. “Nevertheless, it is clear that families or extended kin groups held exclusive use rights to firmly demarcated plots of land for farming.”18 Women worked the farms, planting small batches of crops in different parts of their plots, while men tended small gardens of tobacco grown next to homes within the city.

  The fact that these distant farms fed the city dwellers raises another question. Were people at the BBB Motor Site offering tribute or a food tax to elites who lived on top of Monks Mound? I decided to pose this question to some archaeologists in the best place to talk about Cahokia’s history: a pub in Edwardsville, Illinois, called The Stagger Inn. Founded by an archaeologist, it’s known to Cahokia researchers simply as “the archaeologist’s bar.” Every Thursday, people working the digs all over Cahokia converge on the place for beer, hamburgers, and delicious fries.

  At a battle-scarred wooden table next to a stage where musicians were setting up, I was joined by Tim Pauketat and Indiana University, Bloomington, anthropologist Susan Alt. I immediately started asking them about Cahokia’s economic structure because I was curious about whether the city’s elites persuaded people in the outlying farms to bring them food. Was there some kind of trade network? Pauketat actually rolled his eyes when I asked that. He and Alt were both very opposed to the idea that Cahokia might have been a trade center, and called it a mistake to view the city as an economic entity. “The primary purpose of the city was not trade or work. It was spiritual,” Pauketat said, after I plied him with more beer. “Wealth isn’t really the right word for what they had, but it was a side-effect.”

  Alt had further evidence that Cahokia was a place devoted to spiritua
lity. She was excavating at a site devoted to spiritual rituals called Emerald. Located in St. Clair County, Illinois, Emerald might even have been the birthplace of Cahokian spirituality—it’s full of Mississippian artifacts but predates Cahokia’s population explosion. “Maybe people came there, then immigrated to Cahokia and stayed?” Alt mused. If true, that would provide more evidence for the idea that Cahokia’s founding grew out of emerging belief systems rather than trade concerns.

  But there had to have been some economic system, I argued. After all, some people were growing food and other people were eating it. Was there trade with other cities along the river, or a marketplace where toolmakers from the downtown area could trade for maize from the uplands? Pauketat shrugged. “Sure, some people were specialized, or getting food from other people, but practices were heterogeneous. It would have worked differently in different neighborhoods.” Maybe people in one neighborhood traded their Ramey pottery with another neighborhood that produced particularly excellent reed mats, he suggested. Maybe families from another neighborhood pooled the food they gathered each day for big group dinners. And perhaps certain communities made special deals with outlying farms to get seasonal surpluses. Fritz agrees, suggesting that families worked out distribution among themselves. As evidence, she points out that there are no remains of large storehouses that could hold piles of grain and other food for elites. There’s also the cultural legacy among tribes like the Hidatsa, descended from Mississippian groups, who use the kinship system for divvying up harvests.

  As urban historian William Cronon writes, a city is the sum of its buildings and its agriculture. The diversity and size of Cahokia’s farms were every bit as stunning as its monumental mounds, and arguably more democratic. Though only a few people ever stood on Monks Mound to address the people, Cahokia’s farms were for everyone. They were like the city’s many plazas, open to the public, and providing bounty for all.

  Closing up house

  Cahokian celebrations didn’t happen exclusively at the big mound downtown. They mostly took place in small plazas and public buildings, in neighborhoods far from the sacrifices and speeches. Not everyone could fit into the downtown Grand Plaza, of course, but these local celebrations weren’t mere overflow seats. Instead, they reflected Cahokia’s diverse cultural makeup. This was a city of immigrants, who didn’t all share one language or set of traditions. Especially during feast times, when lots of tourists came to town, there would have been family reunions and gatherings of people who came from similar backgrounds. They would have participated in variations on the big downtown celebration, perhaps involving local leaders who could conduct ceremonies in the languages preferred by people in that neighborhood.

  One such ceremony is known colloquially among archaeologists as “closing up,” and it will sound familiar because it resembles what happened to Dido’s house and many others at Çatalhöyük. Throughout the city, researchers have found evidence that Cahokians had special rituals for ending the life of a house or building. First they would pull up the wooden poles that formed its walls, recycling them for use as firewood. Then, they would carefully fill the postholes with colorful clay, sometimes flecked with shimmering mica, or mixed with pottery and tools that may have come from the home’s past history. The floor would be washed with water or covered in soil. Sometimes a house would be burned. It’s not uncommon to find that people dug a pit in the floor of an abandoned house, then filled it with the smoking remains of domestic items: pottery, corn cobs, woven mats, jewelry, broken stone knives. All these rituals seemed to seal up the old house, and made the space ready for a new home.

  Cahokians loved to build their homes right on top of the ritualistically closed-up floors of previous ones. They drove new wall posts right into the filled postholes of the last house. When archaeologists excavate a home, they frequently find several floors carefully packed atop each other, each one representing roughly a generation of residents. It’s as if people were giving their houses funeral rites. You might say Cahokians believed their city was alive, but they also accepted that its lifespan was finite.

  The closing up ritual isn’t quite the same as what we saw at Çatalhöyük, where it appears that homes were often abandoned and left to collapse before new people moved in atop them. And it’s not what we see at Pompeii, where a new generation of liberti converted the villas of their predecessors into bakeries and shops. Instead, it appears to have been a way of implanting the idea of abandonment into the infrastructure of the city itself. The mounds and borrow pits were made to last, but human housing was temporary.

  Perhaps this idea made it easier for people to leave the city and move on. As we think through the dramatic expansion and abandonment of Cahokia, we need to keep in mind the fundamental idea of “closing up.” This was not, after all, a European or Southeast Asian city. It was an American indigenous city, and its people didn’t view urbanism the way their counterparts across the oceans did. They weren’t necessarily aiming to create a civilization that would spread across the earth, and last forever. Maybe they thought of the city as a version of their houses, with an end built into its beginning.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Great Revival

  To find out more about the Cahokian world, I joined an archaeological excavation there, and visited researchers in the field for two summers a row. These excavations were led by two archaeologists who specialize in Cahokian history: Eastern Connecticut State University professor Sarah Baires and University of Toledo professor Melissa Baltus. They had assistance from researcher Elizabeth Watts and many tireless undergraduates from the Institute for Field Research. Together, they spent their summers opening up three large trenches in what they thought would be a sleepy little residential neighborhood southwest of Monks Mound.

  The more they dug, the more obvious it became that this was no ordinary place. The structures they excavated were full of ritual objects that had been charred by sacred fires. We found the remains of feasts along with a rare earthen structure lined with yellow soils. Baires, Baltus, and their team had accidentally stumbled on an archaeological treasure trove that was linked to the city’s demise. The story of this place would take us back to the final decades of a great city where public life was undergoing a radical transformation.

  East St. Louis palimpsest

  Uncovering a lost city in the modern world isn’t exactly like playing Tomb Raider. Instead of hacking through jungle and fighting a dragon, I drove to Cahokia on a road that winds through the working-class neighborhoods of East St. Louis and into Collinsville, Illinois. As recently as the 1970s, the ancient city’s elevated walkways and mounds were covered over by suburban developments. Just west of Monks Mound was the Mounds Drive-In Theater. For centuries, farmers plowed over Cahokia’s smaller landmarks. Mounds were demolished for construction projects. Construction workers in the 19th century demolished an enormous pyramid called Big Mound that once towered over St. Louis, using its clay as fill beneath the railroad tracks.

  All that changed 40 years ago when Illinois declared Cahokia a state historic site, and UNESCO granted it World Heritage status. The state bought 2,200 acres of land from residents, clearing away the drive-in and a small subdivision. Now the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is devoted to preserving what remains of the ancient city’s monumental downtown architecture.

  By the time I got to Cahokia, Baires and Baltus had already been digging for several weeks in the broiling southern Illinois heat. To reach the excavation, I pulled up on a gravel turnout behind some old gas tanks and trudged through the muddy grass of an unmarked field until I saw a bunch of people with shovels clustered around three open pits. It was 7 a.m., but I was actually a bit tardy—the team started every day around 6:30 a.m. to avoid working through the late afternoon heat.

  Baires and Baltus chose to explore this unassuming area, known as the Spring Lake Tract,1 based on a magnetometry survey that Watts had done several months before. Using a handy shoulder-mounted magnetometer, Watts care
fully paced out the entire field, looking for signs of ancient habitation.

  Magnetometers are perfect for sniffing out buried structures because they can detect anomalies that represent disturbed earth, burned objects, and metals several feet beneath the surface. Watts’ magnetometry map revealed a distinctive pattern of promising dark rectangular spots or anomalies, their shapes and positions too precise to be natural. They looked an awful lot like the floors of homes arranged in a semicircle, perhaps around a courtyard.

  The courtyard shape is what caught Baltus and Baires’ attention. Late in Cahokia’s history, there was an inexplicable shift in the city’s layout: people abruptly stopped building on a north-south grid and returned to open courtyard plans that imitated the village layouts from before Cahokia’s founding. Maybe they were seeing one of those late-era neighborhoods in the magnetometry. There was another alluring element to the Spring Lake Tract as well. The archaeologists wanted to know what ordinary people were doing during the city’s transition, and this spot was well beyond the elite sphere of Monks Mound.