Much like our inability to determine just what group of Homo sapiens traveled northward towards Europe during the Cultural Revolution, and returned the species we bear a direct evolutional link to, we know very little about the society of the Cahokia. When anthropologists talk about the Cultural Revolution, we know that weather patterns, leadership and resources played a role in the massive migration northward from the savanna to the plains. Not surprisingly, these are exactly the factors that lead to the migration of the Mississippian peoples away from the Midwest and back to the southeast where it remained “until the appearance of the Europeans” (Birmingham 163).
The complex jump from tribal, organized religion which had at most possibly 100 people to a large society of over 10,000 is astonishing, to say the least. The complex interactions that are intimately tied to this size of civilization, large public works, well defined boarders and localized leadership or chiefdom. Not to mention the farming, clothing and trading that went on to gather the needed properties to thrive. The Mississippian peoples influence was also, therefore, widespread in its need for goods as well as its valued exports from farm yields.
All of the sudden, this magnificent sophistication of people seemingly disappears transparently as they organized and began. The hundreds and hundreds of years of influence were lost on the tribes that inhabited that area when settlers eventually moved out towards Wisconsin and other Midwestern states. What remains of their culture includes the massive temple mound constructions, some so complex like flat top pyramids are considered the largest prehistoric construction. There is also evidence of large ceremonial practices by the chiefdoms like the Green Corn Ceremony. The strangest thing about this tribe is the amount of information we have about them. It may seem like anthropologists can know a lot from these reliquaries but we cannot know what we consider the most basic facts, the name of these people, where they saw themselves in relation to the world around them and what drove them towards developing into such a large culture.
I think it's interesting that the most information we have is on the temple mounds but there are still such gaping holes in that information.I think it's also funny that now we sign our names on EVERYTHING; graffiti tags, papers, drawings, and even sometimes on the tags of our clothing. If only the Cahokias were as anal about letting everyone know what belongs to them maybe we would have better insight into why and whom made the temple mounds.
ReplyDeleteI think you raise a lot of interesting questions here, but I'd love to see you speculate about how and why we see these large cultural changes taking place. Find an argument there..
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