Book Review: The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America

The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America by George R. Milner, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004.

I have always had an interest the the moundbuilders, and hope to travel east to visit some of the mound sites.  It is truly amazing the work that was done by ancient inhabitants of North America, and even more impressive when you consider that we only have less than ten percent of the original sites remaining as many have been covered by farms or urban growth.  

This book presents the story of the moundbuiders in a chronological order, dividing the chapters into mobile hunter groups, sedentary hunter groups, builders of burial mounds Woodland period, the chief period, villagers and lastly the Trail of Tears.

The book reports on many different sites including: Cahokia from the chief period, Hopewell sites in Ohio, including the Serpent Mound, Moundville.  There are mound ruins throughout the east extending from Florida through Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky and on to Illinois and Ohio.  The book has many pictures of artwork and pottery.  There are also sites where many arrow heads were gathered.  

The book does a very good job of describing many of the mounds as burial sites.  However, as those things on top of the mounds are now gone, it may fall fault in describing other purposes of the mounds.  There are mounds that had wood walls as evidenced by post holes.

I enjoyed this archeological study of Eastern North America.

Cahokia: Ancient Wonder of Ancient North America

Taken from Seven Wonders of North America by Michael and Mary B. Woods, Twenty-First Century Books, Minneapolis, MN, 2009.

artist rendition of Monk's Mound and playing area.

Cahokia was at one time the largest city in North America.  20,000 people resided in Cahokia.  At the time this was as large as the large European cities.  Cahokia was inhabited from about 1150 A.D. to the 1400s.  The people farmed the rich, fertile soil of the Mississippi basin.  This city was in the proximity of East St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River.  The people of Cahokia were mound builders, but later than the mound builders of the Ohio region.  cahokia had distinct classes, a ruling class and the working class.  The ruling class ate better diet, and aged more slowly.  A skeleton was found inside a mound.  About sixty other people had been sacrificed and buried with him.  He appeared to be forty, but may have been older again because of his better diet his skeleton may have appeared younger than he was.
The largest mound in Cahokia was Monk's Mound, so called because monks later inhabited the area and farmed in the rich soil.  This mound was as big as the Egyptian and Mexican pyramids.  It would have taken years to build, as the workers would have hauled the dirt one load at a time.  There was also a large playing area nest to the mound for playing a sport called chunky.  It is assumed the people of Cahokia melded into the local tribes, but by the time Europeans arrived the city was deserted, and Europeans had a hard time grasping that the Indians really made such a town.

Book Review: Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi

Sometimes you come across something which you have never heard of before, and this is one of those times.  Of course I had heard of great Indian mounds, but a city just north of East St. Louis, which rivaled the giant Aztec pyramids of Mexico, that is something new to me.  What is more, this city has been studied by archeologist since the early 1900s and is a State Park.
The story of Cahokia is even more fascinating.  The city began about 1050 AD, or about the same time as a great supernova in the heavens.  There had been others living in the area before, but this structures were torn down, and Cahokia built over the top.  Some of the mounds, for total mass, rival the pyramids of Teotihuacan.  The third largest pyramid of the new world is Monk's Mound.  There is also a grand plaza, on which was laid soil and sand and was likely a place for the playing of Chunky, a game with small rolling stones, and then participants would try to hit the stones with spears.
Many of the structures were burial mounds.  Some of them were built so as to provide theatrical religious shows, and these shows often including human sacrifices especially of women.  Sacrifice may have appeased the gods, but also been used to kill political competitors.
In its heyday the city had a population of 10-15,000 people.  Sometimes they had great city wide feasts, as manifested by junk mounds.  They were also closely ties with neighboring communities, which had poorer economic conditions as manifested by poorer diets.  One of these communities likely supplied young women for sacrifice.
Whether they were influenced by Meso-America or influenced Meso-America is not certain, but they have many similarities, including belief in twin gods (good and evil.) 
The city only lasted a couple hundred years, but its influence lasted much longer.  They perfected warfare by overwhelming attack (there is a site in South Dakota, Crow Creek, where a village of 800-900 was massacred by such an attack in fourteenth century.), there religious beliefs and artifacts are found in many other locations indicating a wide area of trade and interest.  Many Native American groups may be descended from the original Cahokians. 
Another significant find is a rock petroglyph along the Mississippi in Southern Illinois which is an actual map of the Mississippi.
This book is written by Timothy R. Pauketat and published by Penguin Books in 2009.  My only complaint is a few more maps may have been nice, although there are a couple.