Pauketat has come to believe that charismatic leaders created a dynamic social movement with Cahokia at the epicenter, luring inhabitants of far-flung communities away from their homesteads to the fast urban action. Pauketat resists the term cult, but it evokes the phenomenon he envisions. “There were certainly individuals who were movers and shakers, but they weren’t consciously, deliberately exploiting people,” he asserts.

“Cahokia is a political construct,” Emerson adds. “It’s not due to some massive change in subsistence, it’s not archaeological, it’s not  technological. It’s the kind of place that results from changes in how you conduct yourself socially and politically. What happened at

An eight-inch sculpture of a woman bears emblems of the Cahokian culture. Her left hand rests on a feline-headed serpent; in her right hand is a hoe. On her back, the serpent splits into gourd-bearing vines.
Cahokia is politics, probably in the guise of religion.”

Not all scholars see a burgeoning statehood in Cahokia’s remains. Anthropologist George Milner of Pennsylvania State University believes there were at most 8,000 people at Cahokia, and he calculates that with even half that population one person per household working just a few weeks a year could have built Monks Mound. The construction would have proceeded at a desultory pace, he concedes; it may have required hundreds of years to complete. Only if the woodhenges and mounds were rapidly constructed would they require full-time laborers or engineers. And he is skeptical that the ecology of the region, abundant as it was, could have supported a community as vast as that supposed by Pauketat and others.


The trump card for Milner and other minimalists is the fact that, unlike the ancient Mesopotamians, Maya, Egyptians, and Chinese, Cahokians never developed a written counterpart to their spoken language. Writing is generally considered a prerequisite for the kind of record keeping typical of organized governments. (The names “Cahokia” and “Monks Mound” were applied long after the fact: Cahokia was the name of an Illini tribe that occupied the area in the 1600s, and Monks Mound was named for French Trappists who settled on one of its terraces in the 1800s.)

But champions of an advanced Cahokian civilization would rather make their case with numbers than with language anyway. Even Milner admits that if Cahokia was as populous or expansive as some claim, it would have exerted statelike control over its citizens. To

Painting by Michael Hampshire. Courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

A painting of central Cahokia re-creates the wide terraces and thatched temples on top of Monks Mound as well as daily life on the plaza below.

support his theory, Pauketat is looking for evidence that the settlements outside of Cahokia follow a planned pattern—a support network of communities allied with the power center, perhaps communicating with the capital using runners and smoke signals. He found traces of buildings at the intersection of Routes 159 and 64, now home to a Toys ‘R’ Us and a Ramada Inn, and he believes they may have faced Cahokia, a six-hour walk away. That orientation would bolster his contention that the outlying villages were all part of one big polity.

Early in his career at the state department of transportation, Tom Emerson found an eight-inch statuette at the site of a temple two or three miles from Cahokia. Five pounds of distinctive redstone called flint clay had been carved into a kneeling female figure sinking a hoe into the back of a serpent. The serpent’s tail climbs up the woman’s back, bearing squash and gourds like a vine. The images echo familiar pre-Columbian themes of reproductive and agricultural fertility. As similar figures were discovered in the Cahokian environs, a pattern emerged. Around A.D. 1100, Emerson says, the elite of Cahokia seem to have co-opted or codified the fertility symbol, raising it to an unprecedented stature that became a kind of brand identity for the budding metropolis. “They’re taking a symbolism that exists across the entire hemisphere and selectively emphasizing parts of it to their own benefit,” Emerson says.

Some archaeologists have taken the emphasis on the bucolic feminine as a sign that Cahokian society was peaceful, egalitarian, and possibly matriarchal. There is, in fact, no evidence that the city was ever invaded, and no indication of bellicose tendencies other than the robust stockade surrounding the city center. But Emerson warns against this interpretation. For one thing, he says, war wasn’t necessary, because it would have been clear from the city’s size alone that it could mount raiding parties with more members than the total of men, women, and children in any of the surrounding villages. “Nobody could stand against Cahokia. I don’t know that they had to do much actual conflict. It was mostly intimidation.”