Christian Science Monitor: The first experiment in “melting pot” politics in North America appears to have emerged nearly 1,000 years ago in the bottom lands of the Mississippi River near today’s St. Louis, according to archaeologists piecing together the story of the rise and fall of the native American urban complex known as Cahokia.
During its heyday, Cahokia’s population reached an estimated 20,000 people – a level the continent north of the Rio Grande wouldn’t see again until the eve of the American Revolution and the growth of New York and Philadelphia.
Cahokia’s ceremonial center, seven miles northeast of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, boasted 120 earthen mounds, including a broad, tiered mound some 10 stories high. In East St. Louis, one of two major satellites hosts another 50 earthen mounds, as well as residences. St. Louis hosted another 26 mounds and associated dwellings.
These are three of the four largest native-American mound centers known, “all within spitting distance of one another,” says Thomas Emerson, Illinois State Archaeologist and a member of a team testing the melting-pot idea. “That’s some kind of large, integrated complex to some degree.”
Where did all those people come from? Archaeologists have been debating that question for years, Dr. Emerson says. Unfortunately, the locals left no written record of the complex’s history. Artifacts such as pottery, tools, or body ornaments give an ambiguous answer.
Artifacts from Cahokia have been found in other native-American centers from Arkansas and northern Louisiana to Oklahoma, Iowa, and Wisconsin, just as artifacts from these areas appear in digs at Cahokia.
“Archaeologists are always struggling with this: Are artifacts moving, or are people moving?” Emerson says.
Emerson and two colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tried to tackle the question using two radioactive forms of the element strontium found in human teeth. They discovered that throughout the 300 years that native Americans occupied Cahokia, the complex appeared to receive a steady stream of immigrants who stayed. [Continue reading…]
