until 1500 CE. The Mississippian people practiced intensive agriculture, lived in large towns or cities, built large temple mounds, and organized themselves into a hierarchy of social classes. Of the urban centers that the Mississippians constructed, the largest was Cahokia, a city built on the bottom lands near present-day Saint Louis. Cahokia’s establishment was more a revolutionary than an evolutionary event: its builders erected much of the city in a single surge of construction that began around 1050 CE. Archaeologist Timothy Pauketat speculates that the Cahokians may have drawn inspiration from the Crab Nebula supernova of 1054, which produced a bright new star visible everywhere in the world. Cahokia was centered on a massive, terraced platform mound, known today as Monk’s Mound, which stands over one hundred feet high and is comparable in size to the stone pyramids of Mesoamerica. The city featured several other platform temple mounds, a vast public plaza, several wooden “henge” structures used as astronomical calendars, and the dwellings of about fifteen thousand residents. No other city north of Mexico would reach this size again until the 1700s.15
The Mississippians’ hierarchy comprised a small elite of priests and nobles, a large class of commoners and warriors, and a population of slaves at the bottom. Mississippian slaves were generally war captives, and like slaves elsewhere in the world they were (to borrow sociologist Orlando Patterson’s term) “socially dead,” not part of any kin group or patron-client relationship. Slaves at Cahokia sometimes became more permanently dead: archaeological excavation of one of Cahokia’s mounds uncovered the remains of more than eighty men and women killed at the same time and interred with two high-status men. The eighty victims were almost certainly slaves sacrificed to “accompany” the two priests or nobles into the grave.16
Life in Cahokia was marginally better for commoners, but even they suffered from dietary deficiencies and hard labor, which raises the question of why they would remain in Cahokia and other Mississippian settlements if life was so difficult. Some Mississippians, like the nearby farming villagers who provided Cahokia’s food supply, may have feared attack or enslavement if they didn’t move into the region. Others probably remained in Cahokia and other Mississippian towns for security: there was safety in numbers, and warriors protected commoners from becoming another Indian community’s captives and sacrificial victims. Moreover, there were positive benefits to living in Cahokia that compensated commoners for their other hardships. Based on remains found in a massive midden, or trash heap, at the Cahokia site, archaeologists believe that the city’s elite held periodic feasts in which the whole populace gorged itself on meat and corn and smoked huge quantities of tobacco. These feasts created a collective state of euphoria and torpor that would have boosted public morale. With its public feasts, dramatic sacrificial ceremonies, and protective warriors class, the city of Cahokia offered ample compensations to Indian commoners who might otherwise have led easier lives, had they lived in a smaller town or village.17
Cahokia reached its peak of population and development during the first century after its founding. By 1150 CE, the city’s population declined to about half of its peak level, and by 1300 Cahokia and most of the other Mississippian towns in the Great Lakes region stood empty. Some of this decline one can attribute to a series of droughts that hit the mid-continent during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, depopulating the farming settlements that had previously fed Cahokia. Cahokia and its neighboring villages were also experiencing shortages of firewood by 1150, as the region’s many city dwellers and farmers cut down the trees in the vicinity. Modern scholars detect a rise in individualism and war making among Cahokia’s leaders, demonstrated by their display of increasingly exotic and unique “prestige goods” like shell cups and copper ornaments, and by a shift from the construction of temple mounds to the building of protective palisades. Cahokia’s decline was not merely demographic but cultural: at a time when resource shortages were already placing a strain on the populace, the priest/aristocrat class who ruled the city devoted more resources to warfare and individual display than to collective well-being. Since Cahokia’s elite derived its legitimacy from its mediation between their people and the spiritual world, and since poor harvests and drought indicated that supernatural forces had become more than a little angry, it is unsurprising that the city’s commoners would desert their leaders.18
Other Mississippian centers in the Great Lakes region included Angel Mounds in Indiana and Aztalan in Wisconsin, the latter a fortified Mississippian colony with four large platform mounds. These communities joined Cahokia in decline in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Their depopulation probably resulted from a combination of resource depletion and colder temperatures accompanying the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a global cooling period that began in 1300 CE and lasted half a thousand years. One of the more robust Mississippian offshoots, the Fort Ancient culture of present-day Ohio and Kentucky, lasted somewhat longer than its predecessors. Beginning around 1000 CE, the Fort Ancient people built settlements similar to those of other Mississippians, grouping their dwellings around central plazas with posts that served as solar calendar markers to indicate corn planting and harvest days. Perhaps as a response to the regional droughts that afflicted Cahokia, they developed and dug efficient storage pits for their surplus corn in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Like the Hopewellians and Mississippians, the Fort Ancient people constructed geometric burial mounds, such as Serpent Mound in the Scioto River valley and Alligator Mound near present-day Granville, Ohio. Some of the artifacts they left behind, like stones from the game of chunky and shell-tempered pottery—pottery made with burned shells, to lighten and strengthen the clay—were also typical of Mississippian peoples, and one could find them in the southeast well into the eighteenth century.19
After 1450 CE, a changing (drier, cooler) climate caused the Fort Ancient people partially to disperse. They retained their core settlements but spent much of the year traveling the tributaries of the Ohio, hunting and gathering and trading. The other post-Mississippian cultures of the Great Lakes region decentralized or dispersed at the same time. The former residents of Cahokia abandoned the American Bottom altogether, while the people of Angel Mounds remained near the Ohio-Wabash confluence but resettled in small villages, grouped into a loose confederacy that archaeologists call the Caborn-Welborn culture. The native peoples of Wisconsin split into two groups of settlements, one on the Mississippi River and the other southeast of Green Bay, both belonging to what archaeologists now call the Oneota culture. The Oneotas made shell-tempered pottery like the Mississippians’ and decorated it with bird and water-spirit images reminiscent of the Wisconsin effigy-mound culture, but they themselves did not build mounds and instead buried their dead in small cemeteries. They also spent less of the year in fixed settlements, devoting several months to hunting the bison that had begun moving into the eastern prairies (modern Illinois and Wisconsin) in the fourteenth century. Some of the old “mound-builder” culture did remain: the trade networks that earlier elites had created, and recognition that the old mounds and earthworks in the region still had spiritual value even if few people visited them.20
The Indian cultures that dominated the Great Lakes region in the post-Mississippian period consisted of hunters, farmers, and traders, but no aristocrats or monument builders. European travelers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries considered this a devolutionary change. When they first discovered the mounds and earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Mississippian, and Fort Ancient cultures, Europeans assumed that the “Mound Builders” had been a single advanced civilization. They speculated that this predecessor race had descended from Old World migrants—Phoenicians, Vikings, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, even refugees from the mythical continent of Atlantis—unrelated to their more “primitive” Indian successors. (Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, incorporated this belief into the Mormons’ religious doctrine.) It was not until the late nineteenth century that American ethnographers and archaeologists concluded that the Mound Builders represented several different cultures, all of them Native American. And it took scholars until the late twentieth century to begin working out the social and environmental causes of these different cultures’ rise and fall.21
In the meantime, early European and American explorers persisted in viewing the Great Lakes region as a marginal country. French travelers and traders called it the pays d’en haut
