Cahokia: An Experiment in Living Together

Cahokia: An
experiment
in living
tOgether
Nathaniel A. Rivers
@sOphist_mOnster
A Zine Guide

This zine works to create a unique way of exploring
Cahokia Mounds, IL. The zine treats Cahokia as the
remnants of an experiment in and experience of living
together. And it engages Cahokia as such in order to use
Cahokia to think about the city of Saint Louis, MO. There is
a temptation to understand cities—or any public—as inert
containers in which things happen, in which we live our
lives. But cities, as publics, are other than this. Writing
about Cahokia, author Annalee Newitz writes
Cities are ongoing social experiments, and the remains
of ancient homes and monuments are half-erased lab
notes left by our ancestors. They describe how people
tried to bring diverse groups together with a shared
purpose, to nourish and entertain each other, to overcome
political conflict and climate catastrophe. They also
describe our failures: the authoritarian slave-driving
leadership, the bad civil engineering, and the laws that
limited many people’s access to resources. Our forebears’
eroded palaces and villas warn us about how communities
can go wrong, but their streets and plazas testify to all
the times we built something meaningful together.
The people living in Cahokia decided that it (as a city and
a culture) was a way they no longer wanted to live. They
moved away. Saint Louis—still not as old as Cahokia was—
is a city whose population has declined precipitously over
the last 60 years. All cities come in and out of existence
through the (free and forced) movement of people. The
anthropologist and archeologist duo of David Graeber and
David Wengrow write, “What we would now call social
movements often took the form of quite literal physical
movements.”
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This zine comprises a loose assemblage of descriptions
and discussions of Cahokia from a number of
perspectives. These selections help to establish a
context within which to imagine Cahokia. Alongside
these selections, the zine also contains compositional
practices that ask readers to think about and through
Cahokia Mounds. How can we compose various
Cahokias through writing, sonography, photography,
drawing and videography? How does being at Cahokia
inform what we write, draw and record? In short, how
can we compose Cahokia and how might Cahokia
compose us? The archeologist Tim Pauketat writes,
the materials and media of ritual commemorations or
social action—whether painted imagery, crystal
locatives, or human remains—are also the mechanisms
whereby people routinely or theatrically experience
and remake their identities, beliefs, and histories.
Cities are far from static locations; cities are compositions.
And so our many compositions matter because they are
never simply about a place, a public, or a city. Our
compositions—what we write, say, draw and otherwise
create—take part in composing where we are at and how
we are together.
A mural at the Cahokia Mounds Museum and Interpretive Center
shows the city during its heyday, circa 1100.
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Archaeological evidence for solstice celebrations abounds in the
ancient North American city of Cahokia, located in what is now
Illinois. (Illustration: Steven Patricia/Art Institute of Chicago)
“The more they dug, the more obvious it became
that this was no ordinary place. The structures they
excavated were full of ritual objects charred by
sacred fires. We found the remains of feasts and a
rare earthen structure lined with yellow soils. Baires,
Baltus, and their team had accidentally stumbled on
an archaeological treasure trove linked to the city's
demise. The story of this place would take us back
to the final decades of a great city whose social
structure was undergoing a radical transformation.”
Newitz | Americas Lost Medieval city | 2
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Composition Practice One
Take a few minutes to sketch one of the mounds that
you see. Take your time and attend to the movement of
your pen or pencil and hand as you trace the contours of
the mound before you. What do you notice? What
thoughts or feelings come to mind about the place and
your place in it? Take photos and videos as well.
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Newitz writes that “the framers of Cahokia would have
known about some of these ancient places [such as
Poverty Point] and probably wanted to build a city in
their image.” She continues, pointing out how famed
Cahokia archeologist
“[Tim] Pauketat believes that something like a
religious revival spurred the city's sudden
appearance. Revival movements were common
among Native Americans of the southeast […]
Groups would come from miles around to hear the
leader's teachings and set up temporary camps for
feasting and celebration. The new leaders' ideas
would spread like wildfire, carried by people who
had gone to the revival camps or storytellers
repeating what they had heard.”
Pauketat has speculated that a supernova, which
became visible on July 4, 1054, could have spurred
the religious revival that lead to Cahokia’s rapid
development. “Carbon dating […] dates the
revolutionary transformation of Cahokia into New
Cahokia to about 1050,” and “that 1054 falls into the
‘about’ nimbus around that date. Did the supernova
inspire the Cahokians to rebuild their city, to embrace
ideas that sparked a cultural renaissance, to listen to
messages from gods old or new about themselves
and their destiny” (University of Illinois Press Blog)?
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Composition Practice TWO
List any formative or transformative moments, stories,
legends, and myths for Saint Louis that you can think
of. How have those moments, stories, legends, and myths
played a role (for better or worse) in maintaining or even
reshaping the city?
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Painted Underwater panther effigy bottle from Cross County, Arkansas.
“Shortly after Cahokia’s founding, the Cahokian
way of life spread to the entire Mississippian
region […] Cahokians made a distinctive form
of ceremonial pottery, called Ramey, that can
be found throughout the Mississippian
settlements. People shared Ramey far and
wide to honor the city that founded their
civilization.”
Newitz | Americas Lost Medieval city | 5
7

“Some archeologists believe that the
games observed, described, and sketched
by Adair, Catlin, and the rest originated at
Cahokia. Minimally, this would establish
chunky as an example of Cahokia’s
widespread, pervasive influence on the
indigenous people of eastern North
America. More than this, chunky might
also have been a mechanism whereby
the Cahokian culture was spread.”
Pauketat | Cahokia | 49-50
Tchung-kee, a Mandan Game Played with a Ring and Pole. George
Catlin.
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“Everything about the architecture here
suggests a highly stratified society led by
charismatic figures who lived above Cahokia's
sprawl on the smoothed top of Monk's Mound.
Ordinary residents of the city spent many long
hours ritualistically hauling clay in baskets from
borrow pits to build the mounds. The leaders
repaid them with words of wisdom and massive
feasts. But at some point that wasn't enough
anymore.”
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Newitz | Americas Lost Medieval city | 8-9
“As the city reshaped itself during the
Moorehead phase, Cahokians violently
rejected the people and symbols of their
once-monumental downtown. Roughly half
the city’s population moved away, and those
remaining began to retreat into their own
neighborhoods, conducting smaller public
rituals and events. The courtyard and public
buildings in the CABB Tract reflect this new
kind of social organization. The city’s central
authority had been supplanted by local
communities.”
Newitz | Americas Lost Medieval city | 9

Composition Practice three
Take a couple of minutes to describe the experience of
moving around and up what’s known as Monk’s Mound.
What impressions are created by the size and scope of the
mound? What is like to be atop it? What might it have
been like to look up at those who resided or address you
from here? (Consider recording this as a video or a voice
memo.)
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Composition Practice Four
From Monk’s Mound write about your experience and
understanding of Saint Louis. What is to see Saint Louis
from atop the “eroded palaces and villas” of the Cahokia?
What affects emerge? What dreams or nightmares? Does
the city look big? Does it appear small? Does it move?
(Consider recording this as a video or voice memo.)
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An artist's
interpretation of
what downtown
Cahokia would
have looked like
in the late
Sterling period,
after the
palisade wall
had been built
around Monk's
Mound and the
Grand
Plaza. National
Geographic.
“Cahokia grew to such an enormous size
because the structure of the city itself 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 for their sense of identity and
community. Their once-unified city
fragmented into many peoples who left
the mounds behind.”
Newitz | Americas Lost Medieval city | 14
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Graeber and Wengrow write,
Cahokia’s population peaked at something in the order
of 15,000 people; then it abruptly dissolved. Whatever
Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its
s w a y, i t s e e m s t o h a v e e n d e d u p b e i n g
overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the
vast majority of its people. For centuries after its
demise the site where the city once stood, and
hundreds of miles of river valleys around it, lay entirely
devoid of human habitation.
People left. The city left with it. The container is the thing
contain. And it wanted out. “Whatever happened in
Cahokia, it appears to have left extremely unpleasant
memories,” remark Graeber and Wengrow. “The Vacant
Quarter [pictured below] implies a self-conscious
rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.” A
place can be otherwise than it is or was. It can be
something wonderful or something horrific. It can even be
nothing at all.
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Resources and references