The Cahokia Chiefdom
From the dust jacket:
Encompassing more than 100 earthen mounds that were constructed during the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, Cahokia is the centerpiece of an area east of St. Louis uncommonly rich in archaeological sites. Because the mounds at Cahokia are more numerous than at any other Mississippian period site in North America, scholars have long believed that they were constructed by a populous, politically centralized, economically differentiated society supported by a vast hinterland. Drawing on his own extensive surveys and excavations, and on a wide array of research that has been conducted in the central Mississippi Valley during the past several decades, George R. Milner argues that, while clearly impressive for its time, Cahokia-area society differed little in its basic organization from the smaller, less complex chiefdoms that dotted the southern Eastern Woodlands. Contending that the scenario of a mighty Cahokia doesn't comfortably fit the available evidence, he shows how the region more likely was divided into quasi-autonomous districts linked by shifting political arrangements among greater and lesser chiefs. He also provides an overview of late prehistoric life in the central Mississippi Valley, highlighting the floodplain landscape; architecture and community layout; distribution of pottery, tools, and trade goods; diet; and population sizes. He demonstrates that the many mounds, the focus of so much archaeological attention, could have been constructed with the labor of far fewer people than previously supposed.
