CAHOKIAN MUSCLE & MIGHT:
The 1997 Grand Plaza Waterline Excavation
from the cahokian WINTER 1997-98
by Timothy R. Pauketat, Ph.D.
State University of New York at Buffalo
In times past, plazas were the central features of social and
religious life at Cahokia and places like it to the south and east
in North America. Plazas were open spaces where ritual gatherings were
open spaces where ritual gatherings were held, where chunkey games were
played, throngs of people converged. It is a good bet that the size of
any plaza at Cahokia is a proxy indication of the numbers of people who
participated in the building and use of that space. For this reason,
Cahokia's central plaza--covering about 50 acres--is telling of a giant
labor force and enormous social gatherings unmatched elsewhere in the
Mississippi Valley. This central open ground is truly a "Grand Plaza,"
as Dr. Melvin Fowler has dubbed it (1997), larger than those of other
Mississippian capitals and even larger than capital plazas of some early
Mesoamerican civilizations.
Several years back, researchers from Southern Illinois University at
Edwardsville observed, using electromagnetic instruments and small test
excavations, that this monumental plaza was not natural (Dalan 1997).
Rather, the Grand Plaza had been leveled through a cut-and-fill method
around the beginning of the Mississippian period (now dated to about A.D. 1050).
In 1994, with a crew from the University of Oklahoma, I found evidence
beneath Mound 49 that corroborated their results: the earliest mound
stages were built at the same time as the plaza was leveled. The
construction of Monks Mound probably began at the same time.
The leveling of the plaza and the building of the early mounds were
monumental work projects potentially as labor intensive as any
construction effort ever at the site. It is all the more important for
our understanding of Cahokia, then, that this monumental project(s)
dates to the very beginning of Cahokia's reign over the surrounding
region. How, archaeologists ask, were people governed and their labor
coordinated to build a plaza and mounds at Cahokia on a scale never seen
in pre-Columbian North America before A.D. 1050 or after the demise of
Cahokia (now dated to abut A.D. 1350)? My own answer, based on past
studies, is that Cahokia experienced the equivalent of the "Big Bang"
(Pauketat 1997). This was a brief moment in history, at about A.D. 1050,
when Cahokia went from a modest pre-Mississippian town (with few to no
mounds) to an enormous center of 10,000 people (Pauketat and Lopinot
1997).
Piecing together the puzzle of why Cahokia's Big Bang occurred
receive a recent boost thanks to a modern waterline. In 1997, the
"Central Mississippi Valley Archaeological Research Institute" provided
the archaeological expertise and labor to excavate ahead of a waterline
that was to pass through the Grand Plaza from north to south and east
to west. With the help of a field school from the University of Buffalo,
we scraped the old plow zone off a yard-wide trench about 1200 meters
(or 3950 feet) in length (see Figure 1).*
Waterline Excavation
Our trench ran the width of the plaza, from east to west, and beyond
into the old Falcon Drive-In theater west of
Mound 48. A second
north-south trench met this east-west segment near the southeast corner
of Monks Mound and extended due south before jogging west to end near
Mound 60 (Fox Mound).
What we found astonished us. Our amazement was not a consequence of
finding any exceptional artifacts or unusual features. There were none.
Instead, we found a remarkably "clean" plaza surface nearly devoid of
either artifacts or the remains of houses and pits until late in the
site's history (or about A.D. 1250). Rather, here--in a slice
three-quarters of a mile long--we laid open something that archaeologists
like even more than artifacts: a scientific means of measuring how much
muscle was involved in the building of the plaza.
We can now estimate, based on the varying thicknesses of the fill
used to level the Grand Plaza (as seen in our trench), how many laborers
were needed to build the Grand Plaza. Why is this important? Knowing
the size of the labor force that was coordinated (if not commanded) by
the new Cahokian "elite" of A.D. 1050 is, in turn, an indirect measure
of the political muscle of these early Cahokians at the very begining
of their political reign over the region. That is, we can begin to
assess the reasons why Cahokia began, at about A.D. 1050, with a Big
Bang. For archaeologists, this sort of information is unusually hard to
get, and yet can reveal pieces to the puzzle of the rise of Cahokia,
the preeminent cultural center in pre-Columbian North America.
*Note: We also excavated in four locations where water lines crossed
or where water fountains are planned. The result--remans of houses and
pits on, under, or near the plaza fill--will be evaluated alongside
the plaza fill itself. The artifacts are being ananlyzed at the
University of Illinois by Susan Basmajian and will be the basis of a
forthcoming study.
References Cited
Dalan, Rinita (1997).
The Construction of Mississippian Cahokia.
In Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World,
edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 89-102.
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Fowler, Melvin (1997).
A Cahokia Atlas: A Historical
Atlas of Cahokia Archaeology (revised).
Illinois Transportation Archaeological Reasearch Program, Studies
in Archaeology 2. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Pauketat, Timothy R.(1997).
Cahokian Political Economy.
In Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World,
edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 30-51.
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Pauketat, Timothy R., and Neal H. Lopinot(1997).
Cahokian Population Dynamics.
In Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World,
edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 103-123.
University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.