Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  CHAPTER 12

  Deliberate Abandonment

  When you’re excavating at Cahokia, you start to appreciate what it was like to build the mounds here a millennium ago. We shoveled clay into buckets, sweated, hydrated, and repeated. Our hands were covered in garbage and dirt. We watched the sun’s path overhead to mark the time, always wary of looming storm clouds. Of course, we hadn’t gone completely medieval. Baltus supplemented our personal observations with a couple of weather satellite apps on her phone. Even when the sky looked cloudless, the American Bottom could brew up a storm in less than an hour.

  One afternoon, everyone’s mobiles lit up with dire warnings about a dangerous hailstorm. Racing against the weather, we packed up shovels and bags with military precision. Once the dark gray clouds gathered over the Mississippi, it could start pouring within minutes. We crammed ourselves into a van and took shelter at a nearby Mexican restaurant as thunder rattled the windows and winds uprooted trees in nearby East St. Louis.

  Over steaming plates of enchiladas and pitchers of frozen margaritas, I pumped the archaeologists for information about what kind of social structure united tens of thousands of people in Cahokia so long ago. What could have drawn so many people to perform backbreaking labor in the broiling humidity? My thoughts went to the charismatic leaders who led Cahokia’s revival movements. “Who got to be at the top of Monks Mound?” I asked. “Was it a chief or some kind of religious leader?” From the way the archaeologists looked at each other I could tell this was a trigger question. “This is a hotly debated topic,” Baltus said finally with a laugh.

  Even if we imagined this revival emanating from the teachings of one person, Baires cautioned that there probably wasn’t a single “chieftain” leading everyone to build their houses a certain way or line their borrow pits with colorful clay. “I don’t like the idea of a chieftain,” she explained. “I think power was more diverse than that. It was a heterarchy.”

  I rolled the unfamiliar word around on my tongue. “Heterarchy—like, a monarchy except a lot of people are in power?”

  The answer turned out to be yes and no. Cahokia’s heterarchy might have been a lot of different groups making decisions and governing themselves. Perhaps there were craft guilds or neighborhood associations. Already, I’d seen that the Spring Lake Tract was full of ritual items. Perhaps they had their own leadership council, too? “If Cahokia was a religious movement, people might have engaged with that on their own terms,” Baltus said. “Their idea of spirituality may have come from home, not the top of the mound.” In other words, ordinary Cahokians may have had their own interpretations of the city’s spiritual power. They followed their own local leaders and customs as well as looking to the people on Monks Mound.

  Rejecting Monks Mound

  In the 1960s, when scientists were still in the habit of digging up Native American ancestors without permission, an archaeologist named Melvin L. Fowler opened up a mound. There, he found the remains of several public rituals—and over 250 human bodies—that give us a glimpse of politics and spirituality in Stirling-era Cahokia.

  Fowler knew that the classical Cahokia grid was mostly aligned on a north-south axis. But there was one oddly shaped mound that didn’t fit. Mound 72 is one of the city’s few “ridge top mounds,” meaning its rectangular body was constructed with a peaked top like a roof. And though it stood precisely south of Monks Mound, it was angled 30 degrees off the east-west axis, pointing in the exact direction of the summer and winter solstice. Fowler suspected this mound might be something special.

  When Fowler and his colleagues dug, they discovered that Mound 72’s ridge top was actually built over three previous mounds, each one marking a significant moment in the city’s history during the 10th and 11th centuries. One of those mounds contained the bodies of 52 young women, sacrificed in some way that did not leave marks on their bones. Their bodies had been stacked in two tidy layers on top of clay platforms, then ritualistically covered over with earth. Another held the bodies of men on litters, similarly arrayed. Buried beneath thousands of pounds of clay for centuries, their skeletons were pressed as flat as flowers between the pages of a book. Stable isotope analysis of their teeth, which can pinpoint where people were born, shows these people were all local to the American Bottom.

  Perhaps the most famous burial in Mound 72 contains the bodies of two people, one atop the other, in what’s called the “beaded burial.” The top body was placed on a river of valuable blue shell beads and may have worn a cloak fashioned to look like a falcon. The burial included hundreds of gorgeous ceremonial projectile points, as well as piles of other valuable offerings. Alongside the beaded body were the remains of several other people, including some who had no heads. The find presented a tantalizing tableau for scientists who wondered about the spiritual and political beliefs of Cahokians.

  Debates over the meaning of the beaded burial have raged in the archaeological community for decades. Initially the bead-adorned skeletons were described as male, with the top one dubbed “the Birdman.” Fowler and other archaeologists assumed the Birdman was a celebrated ruler or warrior, perhaps the source for contemporary Siouan stories of the superhero Red Horn. But this interpretation has been pushed aside in the wake of a groundbreaking 2016 study by Illinois State Archaeological Survey Director Tom Emerson and his colleagues, which chronicles the first comprehensive skeletal analysis of the bodies in Mound 72. They discovered that the two people at the center of the tableau are in fact a young male and a female, suggesting a ritual of fertility. This interpretation is bolstered by the remains of other male/female pairs buried with them, as well as the 52 young women who also may have represented reproductive bounty.

  Now it would seem that the beaded burial wasn’t marking the grave of a great warrior or Cahokian founder. Instead, Emerson argues, we’re probably seeing the remains of a public performance where people representing mythical figures were sacrificed. The city’s elites may have led the performance to show their political and spiritual power, much the way their European counterparts of the same era were conducting public executions and crusades. “This scene looks more like a theatrical sacrifice rather than a burial,” Emerson and his colleagues write. They suggest it might have been a pageant where the city celebrated creation and renewal. Many of the offerings, like shells, are associated with the Underworld in local Native American belief systems—and the Underworld, in turn, is connected to farming and the land’s fecundity.

  Sacrifices like the ones in Mound 72 may have involved joyous retellings of a creation story during the height of Cahokia’s power. Perhaps Cahokia’s leaders incorporated sacrifice into one of the city’s awe-inspiring parties, to commemorate a fruitful harvest. But over time these mass deaths may have led to resentment, especially if decisions over life and death were in the hands of a few people ruling from on high. It’s possible there was a political rebellion. Evidence from the Grand Plaza’s decline would seem to support this idea. After people stop using the downtown area, they also stop engaging in human sacrifice. Maybe Cahokia’s citizens toppled the regime that occupied Monks Mound and created a new social model.

  Without a time machine, we’ll never know exactly what the Cahokians’ political struggles were about. Still, we have some hints about how they saw the world. The symbols they left behind suggest they divided the universe into an Upper World of spirits and ancestors, an Underworld of Earth and animals, and a human world in between. These worlds were not entirely separated, and the liminal spaces where they intermingled were places of great power. Images that bring worlds together are common in Mississippian art. The Upper World, represented by thunder and spirits, and the Underworld, represented by water and agriculture, are intertwined. Baires and Baltus think Cahokians used water and fire in their everyday rituals to draw the Upper World and Underworld together.

  We can see the transformative power of water written into the layout of Cahokia. Though the city’s mounds attract the eye, the deep borrow pi
ts were no less important to urbanites. Left open to the elements, they filled with water on a seasonal basis. The borrow pit that provided clay for Monks Mound is so enduring that it’s still filled with water to this day. Many pieces of ceremonial Ramey pottery are covered in images of water and fish, while shells filled burial mounds throughout the Mississippian world.

  During the Spring Lake Tract excavation, I got a chance to see how one neighborhood sculpted water into its daily activities. Baires pointed at a deep hole the students dug at EB3, uncovering about a meter of a sloping ramp paved in yellow soils. It was obvious this yellow layer wasn’t natural: it wasn’t found in soil from the area and followed an exact 30-degree slope downward. Baires, Baltus, and Watts speculated that it was once the entrance to a shallow borrow pit that supplied this neighborhood with mud. We could see a history of this pit in its sediment layers. At first, the locals allowed the trough to become a seasonal pond. Later, they filled it back up with carefully layered clay, almost like they were building an inverted mound. “We caught the edge of a deliberately filled borrow pit,” Baires explained with a grin. It was an incredibly unusual find, which added evidence to the idea that pits were as important to Cahokians as mounds.

  Fire was even more important, especially late in the city’s history. Fire could join worlds because what was burned on Earth ascended to the Upper World through smoke. Everywhere archaeologists dig at Cahokia, they find charred sacrifices. In 2013, construction workers building a freeway in East St. Louis discovered the remains of a late Cahokian neighborhood built entirely for the purpose of ritual burning. Dozens of tiny houses, full of corn and other valuables, were constructed rapidly and then torched. Nobody had ever lived in those homes. It appears that the entire neighborhood was essentially burned in effigy.

  At the Spring Lake Tract, all our excavation blocks were layered with periodic burns. The group at EB1 dug up enough ground for Baires and Baltus to figure out where all its overlapping structures once stood. The lowest level was a clay floor from the Stirling phase, at the height of Cahokia’s power. That floor was burned at some point and covered in another layer of clay for the floor of a later structure. In the later structure, people dug a pit into the floor, carefully lined it with a mat, and then filled it with valuables like the beaker handle and ancient Woodland projectile point. People burned the pit and its contents, too, possibly to commemorate the first burn.

  I watched as Baires and Baltus gingerly used their trowels to reveal charred remains of the mat that once lined the offering pit. Its furled edge wound across the clay and looked like a crisscross pattern etched in charcoal. We weren’t actually looking at the mat itself, but the impression it left behind in the earth as it smoldered. “It’s nuts,” Baires said. “We never find things like this.”

  At EB2, there were no elaborately interpenetrating layers of ritual burning, but the structure itself was an unusually large rectangle that suggested a public space rather than a home. Plus, all those burned deer bones and broken Ramey pots inside were a sure sign that some kind of celebration happened here. It was easy to imagine the ceremonial structures we’d uncovered at EB1 and EB2 standing next to a ritualistically dug trench, its floor layered with pale yellow clay.

  Slowly, the layout of the neighborhood was emerging around us. This was no ordinary domestic area; people who lived here were heavily engaged in the city’s political and spiritual life, conducting regular rituals. But this place also represented a trend in late classical Cahokian culture. City dwellers stopped using Monks Mound and the Grand Plaza for public performances and started conducting more rituals at home, on a smaller scale. Local identity eclipsed city identity, and the rigid city grid returned to the courtyard layout of pre-Cahokian days.

  This insight also shed light on the importance of the borrow pit at EB3. It was a localized version of the giant borrow pits that supplied clay for Monks Mound, offering people in the neighborhood a constant reminder of how the Underworld intrudes into our own.

  Revitalization before the fall

  Baires and Baltus make a good investigative team because their areas of expertise span the city’s history: Baires focuses on the classic Stirling phase, while Baltus explores the later Moorehead phase. But both are fascinated by what Baltus calls a “rejuvenation period” late in the city’s life. Before it was completely abandoned in 1400, Cahokia went through a final revitalization movement. This movement might have started with a person or group suggesting a new way to live, contact with new allies, or a new relationship to agriculture and the Underworld. As a result, Cahokia was rebuilt rapidly by people seemingly on fire with belief.

  They reconstructed their homes using the courtyard neighborhood layouts from Cahokia’s earliest days. Baltus believes they were reexamining history and seeing it in a different light. When Cahokians dug, they often found old projectile points and other items from the Woodland peoples who lived in the area before the city was built. They treasured these items, the same way people today treasure ancient objects from Cahokia. It seems that Cahokians were celebrating the same kind of “history within history” that Ian Hodder described at Çatalhöyük. Baltus and Baires found a Woodland projectile point in the ceremonial fires buried in the layers of EB1, treated with the same reverence as Ramey pottery. It’s as if Cahokians were embracing retro styles or traditional values.

  In the final revitalization period, people turned their obsession with the past into a new kind of social movement. “We see a return to old practices, including a decentralized religious practice,” Baltus said. But this decentralization didn’t stop at city boundaries. In scattered Mississippian sites across the floodplain and the uplands, Cahokian practices slowly became unbound from Cahokia proper. Farmlands like the one at the BBB Motor Site were swallowed up by forest again. Archaeologists still find ritual burnings on floors, but none of the Ramey pottery that was so characteristic of the city’s symbolism. The population of the city was draining away, and as people left, they took some of Cahokia’s culture with them but left other parts behind.

  During the Stirling period, Cahokians built great plazas and anchored their belief systems to the land. But during the city’s last revitalization, those beliefs became unmoored from the city—perhaps due to disenchantment with the old ways, or just a renewed focus on smaller communities. Eventually, the city’s precincts became so distant from each other that it would be hard to call it a unified city anymore. Its public life was falling apart. After all, Baltus explains, “if you don’t unite people around an identity tied to place, with practices that keep people together, there can be fragmentation.”

  Environmental factors also played a part in the city’s fragmentation. Some archaeologists believe the city was inundated by a massive flood from the Mississippi River that was so destructive and deadly that the survivors didn’t want to stay.1 Baires and Baltus have long been skeptical of this idea2 and devoted part of their summer to disproving it. They invited geomorphologist Michael Kolb to take soil cores around the edges of their dig site. Using a truck-mounted device, he punched out cores that went 3 meters deep, looking for a thick layer of buried river sediments suggesting a flood. He found nothing like that at all.

  Cahokia did suffer through a number of droughts, however, which would have made it difficult for the city to support a large population. Given that Cahokians’ beliefs were tied to the landscape, any environmental changes would have affected them culturally, too. “There’s a cycle,” Baltus explained. “There’s a drought and that changes people’s relationship to the land, then spiritual practices change, then land use changes, spiritual practices change again, and before you know it you have fragmentation and abandonment.” This process sounds like a fast-motion version of what happened at Çatalhöyük, where small acts of abandonment led to larger ones until the city stood relatively empty. Eventually Cahokia also became a place where people buried their ancestors.

  Cahokia grew to such an enormous size because the structure of the city i
tself was part of its residents’ spiritual and political worldview. But over time that centralized belief system began to crumble. When the last revitalization swept the city, people returned to the old ways. They looked to home, rather than the plaza, for their sense of identity and community. Their once-unified city was divided into many peoples who left the mounds behind.

  Survivance

  The abandonment of the dense urban life at Cahokia was not, as Jared Diamond might say, evidence for social collapse. Instead it was a dramatic new phase in the migration of indigenous people across the landscape. Osage anthropologist Andrea Hunter has studied the next phase in Mississippian life,3 as Cahokia’s residents fanned out over the Midwest to join many Siouan tribes. The Osage oral histories tell of a great migration that began in Ohio and paused for centuries in a place where the Missouri River branches off the Mississippi, on the land where Cahokia once stood. Eventually this migration continued again, as the people who became the Osage headed west. Hunter notes that there is strong linguistic evidence tying the Osage and other Siouan tribes to the Cahokia region. Tribes scattered across the Midwest, she writes, share the same words for “corn, gourds, squash, pumpkins, beans, cultivation, plant processing, cooking preparations, and the bow.” This suggests the groups had a common origin, roughly around the time of the Woodland peoples who first started cultivating these crops. Those Woodland people followed the call of a great revival, and settled at Cahokia to build an urban farming society before eventually moving on again.