Timothy R. Pauketat - Cahokia: Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History)

Cahokia: Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History) — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Cahokia: Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History)" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...41

Table of Contents

THE PENGUIN LIBRARY OF AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY

OTHER TITLES IN THE PENGUIN LIBRARY OF AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY

The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears
Theda Purdue and Michael D. Green

The Shawnees and the War for America
Colin G. Calloway

American Indians and the Law
N. Bruce Duthu

Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier
Timothy J. Shannon

The Lakotas and the Black Hills
Jeff Ostler

Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Indian Community
Brenda J. Child

GENERAL EDITOR: Colin G. Calloway
ADVISORY BOARD:
Brenda J. Child, Philip J. Deloria, Frederick E. Hoxie

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Timothy R. Pauketat, 2009

All rights reserved

Image on page 30 used by permission of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Painting by Paul Bradford.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pauketat, Timothy R.
Cahokia : ancient Americas great city on the Mississippi / Timothy R. Pauketat.
p. cm.(The Penguin library of American Indian history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-10450-7

1. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Park (Ill.) 2. Indians of North AmericaIllinoisCahokia Mounds
State Historic ParkAntiquities. 3. Mississippian cultureIllinoisAmerican Bottom. 4. Mississippian
cultureMiddle West. 5. American Bottom (Ill.)Antiquities. 6. IllinoisAntiquities. 7. Middle
WestAntiquities. 8. Excavations (Archaeology)IllinoisAmerican Bottom. I. Title.

E99.M6815P375 2009
977.386dc22
2008054092

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

In memory
of Mike, Preston, Harriet, Warren,
Al, and Chuck

THE MOTHER OF NATIVE NORTH AMERICA

IN THE EARLY HOURS before sunrise, for part of each year, the planet Venus shines as a morning star. Slowly it disappears as the rising sun turns darkness to sky blue. To the ancient Maya and others, this Morning Star was a god, the Sun-Carrier, created to transport the sun into the world of people. In ancient North America, it was viewed as a masculine deity whoat a key moment in historyassumed human form. When seen later in the year as the Evening Star, Venus was considered a feminine god. She appeared then with the setting sun, a harbinger of the night and the netherworld beyond the horizon. Sometimes seen as a creator goddess, she also took human form and, in the flesh, made history.

A thousand years ago, the Morning and Evening stars were central players in an American Indian drama, characters at once mythicsky gods with supernatural powersand human, driven by violence, politics, and religion. And this drama was at the heart of a place we now call Cahokia, ancient Americas one true city north of Mexicoas large in its day as Londonand the political capital of a most unusual Indian nation.

At that time all the stars and planets in the Northern Hemispheres night sky were visible above Cahokia, situated in a broad expanse of Mississippi River bottomland just east of what is now St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokias people looked to the Morning and Evening stars for guidance andinspired by ideas from Mesoamerica, possibly brought back from Cahokian rulers travels or priests vision questsincorporated them into a religion that would displace traditions across the American Midwest, South, and Plains.

Nowadays, one can barely see the stars at night from St. Louis. Tall buildings crowd the sky, and streetlights blot out the stars even as the growth of modern civilization erases the archaeological remains of the ancient North Americans. Still, Cahokia sits silently, awaiting the almost three hundred thousand visitors who come to the site each year. Taking in its grass-covered mounds, vast open spaces, and large watery borrow pits, they ponder the lives of the original inhabitants of North Americas largest pyramidal-mound complex, centered by what is, in fact, the third-largest pyramid in the entire New World.

At one time, there were more than two hundred packed-earth pyramids, or mounds, at Cahokia and its suburbs. More than half of these were built in a five-square-mile zone that was designed with reference to the four sacred directions and the upper and lower worlds. The pyramids were arranged around vast open plazas and were surrounded, in turn, by thousands of pole-and-thatch houses, temples, and public buildings. At its height, Cahokia had a population in excess of ten thousand, with at least twenty or thirty thousand more in the outlying towns and farming settlements that ranged for fifty miles in every direction.

From the beginnings of the Euroamerican city of St. Louis, some of the biggest and most important ancient American monuments were leveled to make way for new developments. Twenty-five mounds were destroyed in St. Louis before the Civil War. Forty-five more were taken down across the river in East St. Louis shortly thereafter. Scores were lost in Cahokia proper, including the second largest, removed by steam shovel in 1930.

Next page

1234567...41

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Cahokia: Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History)»

Look at similar books to Cahokia: Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History). We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Shashi Tharoor

The Great Indian Novel

Donna Martinez

Urban American Indians: Reclaiming Native Space

Timothy Doyle

Africa and the Indian Ocean Region

Dickey Timothy J.

Library Dementia Services

Turner

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Tantor Media.

Old man river: the mississippi river in north American history

Recorded Books Inc.

Holding our world together: ojibwe women and the survival of community

Zitkala-S̈a

American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings

Crutchfield

It Happened on the Mississippi River

Arshia Sattar (Foreword by Gurcharan Das)

The mouse merchant : money in ancient India

Mark Twain

Life On The Mississippi

Timothy R. Pauketat

The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America

Discussion, reviews of the book Cahokia: Ancient Americas Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin Library of American Indian History) and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.