The Cohokia’s were an impressive civilization and build on a truly massive scale. At its height around 1050 A.D Cahokia had a population of 15,000 inhabitants. Along with numerous suburbs and agriculture centers that sprawled from the city giving the city a population of 20,000 to 30,000 people. With these numbers, Cahokia would have been one of the largest cities built north of Mexico.…
3. Mound Builders of Ohio River valley, Mississippian culture of lower Midwest, Anasazi peoples of Southwest…
The Cherokee people were a large and powerful tribe. The Cherokees ' Macro-Siouan- Iroquoian language and their migration legends demonstrate that the tribe originated to the north of their traditional Southeastern homelands. Linguists believe that the Cherokee migrated from the Great Lakes area to the Southeast over three thousand years ago. The Cherokee language is a branch of the Iroquoian language family, related to Cayuga, Seneca, Onondega, Wyandot-Huron, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk. Original locations of the Cherokee were the southern Appalachian Mountains, including western North and South Carolina, northern Georgia and Alabama, southwest Virginia, and the Cumberland Basin of Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern Alabama. The Cherokee sometimes refer to themselves as Ani-Kituhwagi, "the people of Kituhwa". Kituhwa was the name of an ancient city, located near present Bryson City, NC, which was the center of the Cherokee Nation.…
Arizona’s archeological evidence shows proof that nomadic people lived in the Arizona area long before cultivation was possible as early as 15,000 years ago. The people living in the area hunted the large game that roamed the area and gathered things like nuts and berries. Once the animals began to die off and they were able to grow crops three groups became the first permanent settlers of the area, the Anasazi, the Hohokam and the Mogollon. (McClory, 2010) Throughout the years major towns began to develop along with above ground housing, religious ceremonies and trading centers. Around 1100 cities and towns started being abandoned with no reason able to be decided on. (Weir, N.D.)…
The largest city in the Mississippian Society was Cahokia. It had a population comparable to many of the Eurasian cities. It was bigger than any Amerind settlement. It has the biggest mound surrounded by…
What intrigued me the greatest was not the physical aspects of the mounds but the story they tell. Many great minds were involved in educating the public about the significance of the Mound Builders. The mounds not only contained a scientific aspect but also contributed to the development of the human psyche. The research prompted people to realize that the Native Americans were not…
After reading Timothy Pauketat’s insightful essay, “ Cahokia: A Pre-Columbian American City”, I was intrigued by the Cahokia’s people and culture. This society quickly evolved from a village to an elaborate city. The Cahokian complex architectural aspects included better homes, pyramids and plazas. Through expansion, their beliefs and customs were diffused into other civilizations. Due to warfare, many complex advancements were designed to protect the central city. An elaborate 15, 000 log wall was built to defend their city. The advanced Cahokian society was developed prior to any European interaction.…
The Hohokam culture is in many ways similar to that of Ancient Mesopotamian culture. Much like the Pueblo Grande site, people of the Ubaid Period in ancient Mesopotamia built elaborate canal systems, groups of residential houses, and centralized buildings (such as “great houses” or other public buildings). Besides architecture, cultural practices shared by the two groups can be seen in early burial practices, games and agriculture.…
First of all, I have never heard of the name Cahokia before prior to reading the article. I was surprised at the fact that it was once a city in Illinois. In fact, the article described Cahokia as an Illinois Babylon. In addition, a misconception Europeans had about the North American Continent was the idea of it being an empty continent. This misconception was indeed inaccurate. At that time, more than two million people were inhabited in the North American Continent when the whites…
In southern Illinois in Collinsville, the largest prehistoric settlement north of Mexico can be found. This is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site which is 4,000 acres. How Cahokia began and ended to this day is still considered a mystery. The people of Cahokia built more thank 120 earth mounds as landmarks, tombs, and ceremonial platforms. The largest of these mounds is Monks Mound. It covers more than 14 acres, and it once supported a 5,000-square-foot temple on top. Monks Mound is a flat top dirt pyramid which originally took between 15 and 20 billion pounds of soil to construct. This mound is bigger than and of the three great pyramids in Giza, Egypt. Today, Monks Mound has four distinct terraces. It is believed that the building at the summit was the residence for the leader of Cahokia. At the top of Monks Mound, a ruler could see nearly all of Cahokia. It would also be considered a symbol of authority, the governing ruler towering above all of the rest of the city. The amount of man hours needed to construct such a structure must have been astronomical. It is believed that Monks Mound was constructed in various phases over a two to three hundred period. The Cahokians did not have a written language to accompany their spoken one. By the time European settlers arrived in America, Cahokia was all but deserted. The name for Monks Mound comes from the French monks who settled there in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Without any record keeping, it is hard for some to believe that Cahokia possessed an organized government. Writing is generally seen as a prerequisite to the kind of record keeping needed for an organized government. Cahokia was an agricultural state and it crumbled nearly 700 years ago. One possible reason is malnutrition. Cahokian's diets lacked protein. Cahokia is believed to not have had many domestic animals so it would have been much harder for them to obtain sources of protein. Their main…
The Choctaw Indians were an important tribe, and the largest of the Muskogean tribes. The Choctaws have two stories about their origins in their traditional homeland in central Mississippi. One is that their ancestors came from west of the Mississippi River and settled in what is now the homeland. The other is that the tribe is descended from ancestors who were formed by a spirit from the damp earth of Nanih Waiyah, a large mound in northeastern Mississippi. Either way, the Choctaws resided in places, holding most of Southern Alabama and Mississippi with adjoining parts of Louisiana.…
The Cahokia Mounds were the biggest pre- Columbian city north of Mexico, the city was made up of a agricultural society, which had built over 120 mounds, and yet currently only one survives while the rest were destroyed in St. Louis’s rapid growth beginning in the 1860’s (Science). The Cahokia mounds were originally a small community that was situated along the Mississippi river, in the plains of the Midwest. The city of Cahokia grew dramatically for reasons unknown around 1000 C.E, yet by 1300 C.E. the City of Cahokia fell, and the city of Cahokia was abandoned. However, the mounds occupy over “1,600 hectares [or] 3,950 acres” that stretched all the way down to the “northeastern Louisiana”, along the Mississippi river (Science, UNESCO). Cahokia had a population of “10,000-20,000 at its peak between 1050-1150 C.E,” which is why it is suggested that the mounds only took “two-and-a-half years,” instead of the originally believed theory that it took twenty years to move “six million baskets of dirt” to build the massive mounds (UNESCO, Science). The Cahokia Mounds are both a habitation site, and a historic site, because the site was occupied after…
The Mound Builder civilization can be described in terms of Human-Environmental-Interaction (HEI). The Ancient Mound Builder civilization built many Earthen Mounds over a vast period of time in North America. The Mound Builders were hunters and gathers but later began to domesticate the following native plants: Sunflowers, goose foot, erect knot wood, and May grass (“The Woodland Period”). Due to the Mound builders location they had to face many environmental challenges, first the Appalachian Mountain affected the amount of contact they had with other civilizations and made trade hard because they would have to travel over the mountains. The Great Plains provided great land for the Mound builders to plant and cultivates the civilizations agricultural produce such as the following: Sunflowers, goose foot, erect knot wood, and May grass. The Mound builder civilization has many rivers that ran through its boundaries including the following Rivers: the St. Lawrence, Mississippi and Ohio rivers (Kavasch). The Rivers provided water that helped sustain the civilization, and its agricultural produce.…
The ongoing argument concerning the rise of civilization is centered almost wholly around the domestication of plants and animals. The prevailing view of V. Gordon Childe’s principle “that social structure and organization were bent to the demands of technology.” (Childe 1954:23-4), is now directly challenged by what archaeologist Klaus Schmidt is determining from the excavation of Gobekli Tepe; “that far from causing sedentism, agriculture actually responded to it.” (James 2007:784). The archaeological fieldwork surrounding the excavation site of Gobekli Tepe, the world’s oldest man-made temple, brings forth no evidence of an organized, socioeconomic settlement that supported the labor necessary to construct such a grand ceremonial complex. Even the secondary contextual evidence of the immediate area surrounding finds only the activity areas of small groups of hunter gatherers from that same time period.…
Benton Rebold, Janetta, and Robert DiYanni. Indian Civilization. 4th. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2012,2008,2005. 163-164. Print.…