Take pity on the organizers of Cahokia’s wild parties.
A thousand years ago, this Mississippi culture settlement, located near the modern American city of St. Louis, Missouri, was famous for its festivities, that lasted for days.
Crowds filled the space in the squares, while caffeinated drinks passed from hand to hand. People shouted their bets while athletes threw spears and stones.
The Cahokians celebrated wildly: after digging in their ancient waste pits, archaeologists found 2, 000 deer carcasses from a single social feast. The logistics must have been amazing.
Something was missing in the city
Things are calmer these days in Cahokia, now a serene place under the protection of UNESCO.
But the imposing earth mounds hint at the legacy of the largest pre-Columbian city in northern Mexico.
It was a site cosmopolitan of language, art and spirituality. The population of Cahokia could have reached the 30, 000 people at their peak, in the year 1050; thus making it greater than it was, at that time, Paris.
But it is what it did not have, which makes Cahokia surprising, writes Annalee Newitz in her recent book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age It was urban ”).
The massive city lacked a permanent market , dismantling the old assumption that trade is the backbone from the urbanization.
“Cahokia was really a cultural center more than a commercial center. It still stuns me. I keep asking myself: where did they trade? Who was making money? ”Says Newitz.
“ The answer is no. That’s not why they built that space. ”
Newitz is not the only one who is surprised.
The assumptions That trade is the key to urban life shaped a Western view of the past, explains archaeologist Timothy Pauketat, who has studied Cahokia for decades.
“It’s definitely a bias that influenced previous archaeologists ”, he explains.
When excavating cities in Mesopotamia, researchers found evidence that the Commerce was the organizing principle behind their development and then they used the same criteria in ancient cities around the world.
“People thought that this must be the foundation of all primitive cities. It has taken generations of searching for that kind of thing everywhere, ”said Pauketat.
They didn’t find it in Cahokia, which Pauketat believes may have been conceived as a space to build a bridge between the world of the living and the dead.
For many cultures with roots in ancient Cahokia, “water is this barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead,” he described.
Stretching out across a landscape that combines solid earth with swamp, Cahokia may have served as a kind of spiritual crossroads.
“It is a city built between water and the dry land, ”says Pauketat.
The living residents settled in the driest places, while the burial places were destined in the wettest places.
Site scans revealed elevated causeways linking the “neighborhoods” of the living and the dead, physical pathways that literally linked the realms.
And if living on the cusp of the two worlds sounds like a lot Bleak, Cahokians seem to have conceived of their hometown as a festive place.
In Newitz’s book, the author explained that Cahokia planners created structures and public spaces dedicated exclusively to mass gatherings, places where people were excited by the joy of collective experiences.
The most spectacular of all was the great square of 20 hectares, where 20, 000 or more people could gather for celebrations in a space surrounded by earth pyramids.
“It is difficult to imagine the intensity, the greatness, the multidimensionality of an event like that,” says Pauketat.
How were the f iestas
For days, food and drink were brought to the city, where an army of cooks fed the people who arrived for the festivities.
Stockpiles of wild game, berries, fruits and vegetables became shared feasts.
Visitors slept in temporary homes or friends’ houses and went to the plaza for dances, blessings and other events.
In the plaza, the vibrant energy of the crowd turned into a collective roar as viewers bet on episodes of chunkey.
This is a game that consisted of the participant rolling a stone disc across the smooth surface of the ground.
Intensely concentrated, hundreds of athletes threw their spears even as the stone was still bouncing and rolling.
The winner was the one whose spear was nailed closer to the stone, like a huge game of bowls but with deadly projectiles.
The towering posts that lined the great square could have provided another spectacle of athletic grace, deepens Pauketat.
The archaeologist imagines that men climbed the poles or tied themselves to perform dances in the air, a ritual that is still practiced in some Mayan communities of Mesoamerica.
“In the Mesoamerican ceremony, they are placed and These big and tall cypress poles and four men who disguise themselves as birds and fly around, ”he explained. “We have those poles in Cahokia.”
Bracelets and ornaments with snails, feathers and fine leather were part of the most elaborate costumes for such events, explained the archaeologist.
Cahokians loved red, white and black. People adorned their hair with elaborate bows, with Mohawk hairstyles and feathers. Tattoos were also present on some bodies and faces.
When the festivities ended, the Cahokians threw waste into wells that now serve as accounts of what they ate and drank together.
A decade ago, analysis of broken ceramic vessels that archaeologists found at Cahokia revealed biomarkers of a kind of drink, known as yaupon , which is the only caffeinated plant native to North America.
The Cahokians, it seems, kept the festivities in part to get attention. And since the native range of yaupon is hundreds of kilometers from site of the city, we know they made a significant effort to obtain it.
That, in turn, may have consolidated the use of plants in ritual life.
“Part of their value is in the difficulty of acquiring them,” said anthropologist Patricia Crown, who led the analysis of the broken ceramic vessels.
“You had to have the connections to be able to obtain the substance if it was really important to the religious system, ”he added.
Cahokia, today
At present, the place of the Ancient Cahokia is preserved under the name Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Unesco World Heritage where archaeological research is carried out.
Seventy of the original mounds are protected and a long staircase leads to the top of the Monks Mound pyramid, overlooking the great square.
With audio guides, visitors walk a path of 10 km winding through grasslands, forests and wetlands.
Once again, as in ancient times, a constellation of tall poles is aligned with the rising sun to measure the passing of the seasons.
The enclave’s interpretation center features recreated life scenes, along with displays of stone tools and ceramics molded by skilled Cahokian hands.
Modern life is not far away: Cahokia is framed by a stretch of interstates and suburbs in the United States.
But it was not modern development that ended Cahokia’s exciting history.
Over time, the hab Before that, they simply chose to leave the city , apparently driven by a combination of environmental and human factors, a changing climate that paralyzed agriculture, violence, or disastrous floods.
Toward 1400, the squares and mounds were desolate.
When Europeans first encountered the remarkable mounds of Cahokia, they saw a lost civilization, he explains Newitz in his book.
They wondered if some distant people had built Cahokia and then abandoned it, taking with them the brilliant culture and sophistication that once thrived on the soil of the Mississippi lowlands, where the land is enriched by river floods.
But the people of Cahokia, of course, did not disappear.
They just left there and with them the influence of Cahokia moved to remote places, where some of their most beloved pastimes are celebrated to this day.
The yaupon who loved to drink is experiencing a return to fashion as sustainable local tea that can be harvested from the forest.
The c hunkey , Cahokia’s favorite game, didn’t go away either.
In some Native communities, it attracted a new generation of young athletes and is on the Cherokee community game roster, alongside s tickball and blowguns .
But there’s more than that.
To the Cahokians They loved to relax with a good barbecue and sporting events , a combination that, Newitz notes, is notoriously familiar to almost every American today.
“We celebrate that way throughout the United States,” he said. “They fit perfectly into the history” of the country.
You can read this article in Spanish here.
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