So they broke into the earth above three separate anomalies, eventually creating three trenches called excavation blocks (EB1, EB2, and EB3).
As I ambled into the dig site, Baires, Baltus, and Watts were looking down at EB1, muttering to each other about what they’d found. “Ugh—what is this?” Baires asked, looking frustratedly at the floor of a structure that had not seen light for almost a thousand years. I knelt down next to her at the carefully squared-off edge of the pit, trying to imagine a building here. “It’s a palimpsest,” Watts suggested. The group had uncovered layer upon layer of material, suggesting many structures were built in this same place over time. Like most of the team, Watts stood barefoot in the muddy trench so as not to disturb the ground where Cahokians once walked.
Even with my untrained eye, I could tell she was pointing at overlapping building floors: one area of darker clay ended abruptly in a diagonal line like a wall, and alongside it was a uniformly colored area of clay studded with charcoal and artifacts. The walls themselves, made from wooden posts sunk into the clay, would have been removed and recycled by the Cahokians long ago.
EB1 was the size of a modest home, but its life had been far from ordinary. At least one ritual fire burned here, its flames consuming valuable offerings like mica, a beautifully woven mat, a pottery trowel imported from a remote village, and an ancient projectile point from pre-Cahokia peoples that would have been centuries old by the time it was buried here. EB2 and EB3 were similarly unusual, yielding finds that suggested feasting and ritualistic earth-moving activities.
What Baires and Baltus thought would be a bunch of private homes turned out to be a public area full of “special-use structures,” the preferred archaeological term for any building whose purpose goes beyond the everyday. People constructed these buildings for everything from political debates and social gatherings to spiritual practices and party venues. Looking over the neighborhood, Baires said simply, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Following her gaze, I could no longer see the empty field bordered by trees and distant gas tanks. Instead, there were meeting halls, a wide courtyard with a decorated wooden pole at its center, and a sacred pit where Cahokians borrowed clay for their mounds. A huge trash pile full of deer bones and broken pottery hinted at a big feast.
I was looking back in time to a period when the quiet fields around me would have been packed with people, houses, and mounds all the way to the horizon.
Over the Spring Lake Tract the sky was a scalding blue, and the heat was clotted with humidity. Baires and Watts revealed their secret to staying cool: bring a bottle of completely frozen water in the morning and it will have melted to chilled perfection by midday. It’s excellent for pressing against sweaty foreheads as it defrosts, too. Even though the excavation areas were shaded with canvas roofs, we took frequent breaks to guzzle water and reapply sunblock. Everyone wore hats with varying degrees of sartorial cunning. Ultimately it didn’t matter how dorky you looked, as long as you didn’t go home with a burned neck or face.
At first, I wandered between the excavation blocks, trailing after Baires and Baltus as they made their rounds and checked the students’ work. At EB1 and EB2, there were dozens of finds: chunks of ceremonial pottery, a tiny human face re-created in clay, projectile points, the remains of a woven mat, and the triangular handle of a special beaker that once held the hallucinogenic Black Drink. EB3 remained a mystery. It looked like part of a palisade wall ringing the neighborhood on the magnetometry survey, but Baires and Baltus came to believe it might be something else.
The two crouched together at the edge of each block, conferring with Watts and the students. Occasionally they directed the students to wrap an especially valuable find in tinfoil, or fold it into a lunch bag. Everything was carefully labeled; even the soil was scooped into buckets and pushed through a sieve later to catch any remaining items.
I started to learn the verbal shorthand that Baires and Baltus had developed over years of working trenches together. Strategies for “chasing out” or “following out” features that emerged from the clay were developed on the fly. “Let’s follow out this line of burned clay,” Baires directed a student in EB1. The bottom of each structure was a “basin” because the Cahokians built with sunken floors. When we found a structure wall, we “caught its edge” or “caught a corner.” It was as if we were racing after a history on the verge of escape.
Pretty much every dig in Cahokia begins with “chunking out” about 30 centimeters of sterile ground created by years of farmers plowing up the land. Beneath that, the city’s layers begin. With each centimeter removed, the archaeologists go backward in time, working their way through the city’s late-phase dissolution, into the classic era, with its masterful pottery and art. When I arrived, some of the trenches were already about a meter deep.
Digging is a specialized craft, and the students were learning it on the job. Eastern Connecticut State undergrad Emma Wink, who was working tirelessly to chase out an odd layer of yellow soil at the mysterious EB3, told me she was so focused on her work that she forgot everything else. “I’m basically a mole person,” she joked. Over at EB1, where the most artifacts were emerging, Western Washington University senior Will Nolan followed out a tantalizing layer of burn. He said he could feel the difference between layers. The burn felt “crunchy, grainy, and harder to dig.” He knew when he’d gone through the burn because the next layer was “smooth and sticky.”
Baires loaned me a shovel with a carefully sharpened edge, and explained that I wouldn’t be digging. I’d be “shovel scraping,” skimming off just a thin layer of the basin at EB2. Each scrape left a curled sheet of clay in my shovel like a thick, dirty scroll. Any time I felt resistance in the mud or heard a crunch, I immediately stopped and examined the ground, using a pointed trowel to dig gently around anomalous lumps. My first find was a slab of red pottery that crumbled to dust in my fingers. “Don’t worry about that,” Baires assured me. “It’s just unfired clay and it won’t hold up.” Later, I found nuggets of charcoal, blobs of yellow pigment, a few jagged pieces of fired pottery, and several burned deer bones.
The bones were the worst because there were so many of them that they halted our digging dozens of times. We had to be careful to determine that these weren’t human bones because human remains must be reported immediately. Though we’d already identified ours as deer bones, the archaeologists would sometimes do a “lick check” to be sure they weren’t just bone-shaped rocks. Lick check? I stared at Baires in bewilderment. “Do you want to lick it?” she asked. “Bones are porous, so your tongue will stick to it.” The students looked at me. Would the weird journalist do it? Hell yeah, I would. I brought a small fragment of bone to my mouth, tasted salt, and felt my tongue adhere lightly to the surface. “Yep, that’s what bone feels like,” Baires said with a shrug.
After I’d been shovel scraping for an hour, blisters started coming up and popping on my fingers. Later, having fallen exhausted into bed at 8:30 p.m., I could feel the exact part of my thigh that I used to push the shovel handle. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I licked the bones of a deer that had been cooked for a feast in Cahokia 900 years ago. I wished I had been there to see the party, but this might have been the next best thing.
The democratization of Cahokia
If you look online or in books for illustrations that re-create Cahokia, you’ll notice an almost universal error. The mounds and swales of the city are shown covered in a light dusting of green grass, almost like a golf course. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a groundbreaking book called Envisioning Cahokia, a group of archaeologists explains that the city and its monuments would have been built from bald, black mud. No grass would have survived within city limits, though many houses were surrounded by gardens for growing beans, squash, and other staples.
Against the dark, swampy mud, the wood-framed and thatched houses of Cahokians were colorful, decorated with mats, carvings, and plaster. Cahokians planted wooden poles i
n public areas, possibly painted and decorated with fur, feathers, baskets of grain, and other symbolic items. We can’t be sure whether these poles were ceremonial, or more like signposts. Perhaps they were both. Archaeologists can see where they were placed by charting the locations of deep, cylindrical holes punched into the earth of mounds, plazas, and the front yards of houses. Though the wood has long ago rotted away, its shape remains, sometimes with a bit of ceremonial mica or ochre at the bottom, tucked beneath the bottom of the post.
Archaeologists mark the eras of the city based on the orientation of its houses. During the Lohmann phase (1050–1100 CE), when people first built Cahokia’s Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, they organized houses into courtyard patterns with several dwellings facing a small central plaza. During the Stirling phase (1100–1200 CE), often called Classic Cahokia, people built on a strict grid with houses and mounds oriented in a north-south direction. This was also the city’s heyday, when it had the biggest population. In the final, Moorehead phase (1200–1350 CE), people returned to the courtyard plans of the Lohmann phase.
But these different city phases weren’t just architectural fads. Archaeologist Susan Alt argues the transformation “marked social change.” Nowhere are these changes more obvious than in the downtown area where Monks Mound rises above the Grand Plaza. This central meeting place was an engineering marvel, carefully sloped during the city’s construction to allow water to drain off during public events. Everything about the architecture here suggests a highly stratified society led by charismatic figures who lived above Cahokia’s sprawl on the smoothed top of Monks Mound. Ordinary residents of the city spent many long hours ritualistically hauling clay in baskets from borrow pits to build the mounds. The leaders repaid them with words of wisdom and massive feasts. But at some point that wasn’t enough anymore.
During the late Stirling phase, there must have been quite a bit of urban unrest. The elites of Monks Mound erected an enormous wooden palisade wall all the way around the Grand Plaza, effectively enclosing themselves in a walled neighborhood and turning the public space of the plaza into something more private or exclusive. This may have led to more problems. If people were literally kept out of the downtown area by a giant wall, as Baltus puts it, “they might feel disenfranchised.” Shortly thereafter, the Grand Plaza fell into disrepair. Alt writes, “Domestic buildings and refuse-filled features seem to have been relocated around and onto the plaza perimeter, perhaps as part of a general redesign of downtown Cahokia in conjunction with the recently built palisade wall. By 1300, there were probably few to no residents left in this inner sanctum.” In other words, nonelites moved into the area and even dumped trash there. During this period, people also tore down Woodhenge, the great circle of wooden poles marking the solstice.
As the city reshaped itself during the Moorehead phase, Cahokians violently rejected the people and symbols of their once-monumental downtown. Roughly half the city’s population moved away, and those who remained began to retreat into their own neighborhoods, conducting smaller public rituals and events. The courtyard and public buildings in the Spring Lake Tract reflected this new kind of social organization. Local communities had supplanted the city’s central authority.
One might argue that the city went from an authoritarian design to something more democratic. Lane Fargher, an archaeologist studying the urban development of indigenous cities located in today’s Oaxaca, Mexico, describes a city called Tlaxcallan that was built in the 1250s CE, during the years when Cahokia was undergoing its big revival and transition. Writing about Fargher’s work in Science, journalist Lizzie Wade explains:
Most Mesoamerican cities were centered on a monumental core of pyramids and plazas. In Tlaxcallan, the plazas were scattered throughout every neighborhood, with no clear center or hierarchy. Rather than ruling from the heart of the city, as kings did, Fargher believes Tlaxcallan’s senate likely met in a grand building he found standing alone 1 kilometer outside the city limits. This distributed layout is … a sign of shared political power, he says.2
The layout of Tlaxcallan sounds a lot like Cahokia in the Moorehead phase, when people had turned away from the Grand Plaza and built their own smaller plazas within neighborhood courtyard communities. A plurality of plazas might point toward a democratizing current in Cahokia’s public culture, too.
Against “collapse”
Like all the cities we’ve seen in this book, Cahokia was not static, and its remains tell a story of a culture that dynamically moved through several phases over the centuries. That’s why many archaeologists today are questioning the idea that civilizations have “classical” or “peak” phases that we can contrast with a “collapse” phase. The idea of collapse comes out of the same 19th- and early 20th-century colonial traditions that brought us the idea of lost cities miraculously “discovered” by European archaeologists. Thinkers in this tradition hold that all societies progress along the same path that European civilizations took, growing bigger, more hierarchical, and more industrialized over time. Societies that don’t embrace market economies are dubbed “undeveloped,” and cities that stop expanding are characterized as failures whose culture has collapsed. But this perspective doesn’t fit the evidence.
By the 1970s, archaeologists and urban historians had accumulated loads of evidence that urban civilizations have no set developmental pattern. Plenty of cities, including Angkor and Cahokia, are organized around nonmarket principles. Metropolitan areas expand and contract with waves of immigration over time. When a city’s population breaks apart into smaller villages, that isn’t a failure. It’s simply a transformation, often based on sound survival strategies. The culture of that city lives on in the traditions of people whose ancestors lived there, many of whom will go on to build new cities in its image. Civilizations might cycle through a number of high-density urban phases and dispersal phases over the course of centuries.
The collapse hypothesis was nearly dead when Jared Diamond published his popular book Collapse in 2005. Based mostly on anecdotal evidence from cultures like the Maya and Polynesians on Easter Island, he argues that societies “collapse,” or fail, when they engage in environmentally unsound practices. His argument played into a lot of myths about how cities work, including the idea that cultures are wiped out when their high-density settlements disappear. As we’ve seen with the cities in this book, urban abandonment does not mean some kind of cultural death. Usually it means that city people have migrated elsewhere, bringing the values, art, and technologies of the city with them to new homes. Diamond is right to highlight environment as a contributing factor in urban dissolution, but that’s only one part of the story. Abandonment is most importantly a political process.
Immediately after Collapse came out, many archaeologists and anthropologists scrambled to correct misconceptions and errors in Diamond’s account. Anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee published a volume called Questioning Collapse, an anthology of scholars who present hard data showing that Diamond’s idea of “collapse” was scientifically unsound. They argue that civilizations like the one on Easter Island were decimated by the political process of colonialism, not poor environmental practices. And when it comes to Mayan “collapse,” they point out that there are still millions of Mayans living in Mexico. Can a culture that still thrives really be said to have collapsed? Guy D. Middleton, an anthropologist who has spent his career studying social transformation, chimed in with a book called Understanding Collapse, in which he argued that there is never a single reason for abandonment. And, moreover, societies tend to be far more resilient than their settlements.
Today, most archaeologists who study ancient cities refuse to use the term “collapse” at all, preferring instead to describe social change. Many believe that Diamond’s work has misled the public about the way civilizations truly operate. Though most prefer to provide counterevidence as a corrective, others have gotten fed up. American studies scholar David Correia published an essay about Diamond’s w
ork called simply “F**k Jared Diamond.”3 Correia calls out Diamond’s “environmental determinism,” which leaves out the crucial political aspects of urban transformation. Meanwhile, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wingrow take issue with the way Diamond suggests that civilizations at their peak are always hierarchical, and that those hierarchies can only be dislodged by environmental catastrophe followed by a collapse. They write:
Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization … it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size.4
Here they refer to democratic architecture that’s similar to what we see in Moorehead-phase Cahokia, or at Tlaxcallan in what is today Mexico. Ultimately, the point Graeber and other anti-collapse scholars are making is that there is no one path to urbanism and social complexity. More importantly, urban abandonment does not lead to social collapse. People are resilient, and our cultures can survive volcanoes and floods, even if our cities don’t.
These sometimes bitter debates are ultimately about how we define public spaces and the societies that use them. Every city is an experiment with using architecture to create a public sphere, and Diamond’s environmental determinist perspective suggests that this sphere collapses when people mismanage their natural resources. What he gets wrong is that the public is diverse and always changing. And often, these changes can be seen clearly in city layouts. By ignoring this capacity for change, Diamond has injected a popular nihilism into stories about city-building. He suggests some civilizations are doomed to fail, while others will inevitably succeed. Perhaps a better way to look at cities is as ecosystems whose components are always transforming, and whose boundaries expand and contract naturally. Maybe all our cities are in constant cycles of centralization and dispersal; or, if we think with our galaxy brains, they are temporary stops on the long road of human public history.
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