Cahokia in Illinois, the great earthwork city of the Mississippian culture and the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, whose plazas and mounds were the centre of its religious life.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingPlatform-mound and plaza centres of the maize-farming societies of the North American Southeast and mid-continent, built between roughly 1000 and 1600 CE, in which the flat-topped mound, the open plaza and the ruler's residence formed one ceremonial and political arrangement. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredThe descendants are living nations, among them the Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Choctaw, Caddo, Osage and Quapaw. The emptying of the mound centres was a dispersal rather than a disappearance. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsMississippian is an archaeologists' label for a shared complex of maize agriculture, platform mounds and iconography. It is a period and a culture-type, not a people: the societies it covers spoke Muskogean, Siouan, Caddoan and other unrelated languages. 2 Learn More
Mississippian Sacred Sites
This small group gathers a sacred site of the Mississippian culture, the mound-building societies of the North American Southeast and Midwest, whose great platform mounds and plazas, as at Cahokia, were the centres of a complex ceremonial and political order.
The browser will find the site the atlas classes here. The entry describes what is known of its religious and ceremonial role.
All Mississippian Sites
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Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi
Timothy R. Pauketat, Viking, 2009on Mississippian towns and mounds
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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