Cahokia and the Archeology of Power / Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis (2001)

Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power. By Thomas E. Emerson (Tuscaloosa, Alabama, The University of Alabama Press, 1997. Pp. xvii, 317. $29.95) Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis. By Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler. (Urbana, Illinois: Illinois University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 366. Cloth, $55.00; Paper, $24.95) These books cover aspects of the justly famous Cahokia Mounds site in the East St. Louis area of southern Illinois. The site is a World Heritage designated site, and contains the remains of what is indisputably the most complex archaeologically known north of Mexico. For one thing, the total mound construction at the site exceeds one million cubic meters of earth fill. Nearly two-thirds of this mound volume is in a single mound, Monks Mound, which towers some thirty meters high over the American Bottom locality in Illinois across the Mississippi River from Saint Louis. While archaeologists agree on the importance and size of the site, there has been considerable argument over exactly what kind of society was responsible for such grand works. Indeed, the study of the Mississippian cultures (as they are called by archaeologists) has become recognized as central to the understanding of societies that balance on the cusp between tribal organization and the full-fledged development of class-based, state-level political organizations. The two books are very different in tone and represent only part of the range of interpretation of this complex site, namely the view that has sometimes been characterized as exaggerationalist. To achieve full balance in treatment, these volumes should be read together with more minimalist interpretations such as George Milner's The Cahokia Chiefdom: The Archaeology of a Mississippian Society. (Smithsonian Press, 1998) or the earlier work by Mark W. Mehrer, Cahokia's Countryside: Household Archaeology, Settlement Patterns and Social Power. (Northern Illinois University Press, De Kalb, 1995). Young and Fowler's account of Cahokia is an historical account of the development of Cahokia archaeology from what began as research carried out under the program (paradigm) of what was known as culture history. It is more than that, however, since it is an intensely personal and biographical treatment of Illinois archaeology during the career of the junior author, indicated in third person as throughout the text. This book is an important memoir of one of the senior practitioners of Illinois archaeology in the post WW. II period. As such, the volume is important, not only as a chronicle of Illinois archaeology, but also as a document of the attitudes and difficulties faced by the postwar archaeologists not from the upper class background typical before the war. Such personal accounts have been rare in archaeology, and this book is destined to be commonly cited in future histories of archaeology in America. If its view of Cahokian society is rather grand, at least in the eyes of the minimalists, it is nonetheless, a useful introduction to the field. I should note that the terms metropolis, urban, and city used in the book are, as acknowledged by Fowler in his introduction (p. …