Remarkable Mound In Cahokia example essay topic

North of Mexico, the pre-Colombian settlement of Cahokia was the most influential and intricate Native American community in North America. A society of mound builders, which endured from about 9500 B.C. to 1400 A.D., they set up a massive trading center complete with their own types of governing bodies, architecture, religion, sophisticated farming, and local specialties. Inone way or another, the Cahokian culture touched even the far reaches of the present day United States", from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, from the Atlantic coast to Oklahoma", all from its central location in the Mississippi region. It is for these reasons that Cahokia was a superior power in the New World before the Europeans came, and even now, can be considered important and mighty. The first factor that indicates the might of the Cahokian culture is the great structures of earth that they created for public buildings, residences of the nobility, religious purposes, and as burial ground. These mounds, 120 in number, were built on an area exceeding five square miles, and usually were between six and twelve feet in height.

The largest mound however, named Monks mound for the colony of Trappist monks who later tried colonize atop the construction, covers today 14 acres at the base and rises 100 feet in height. What is even mightier about this mound, which happens to be the "largest pre-historic earthen structure in the New World", is that it took over 19 million hours of labor to complete, and that it was done all by hand. The 22 million cubic feet of dirt it took to form the mound, was deposited in stages from about 900 to 1200 A.D... The greatness that is Monks mound was probably used for governing, ceremonies, and for the Cahokian leaders' living spaces and burial plots. Another remarkable mound in Cahokia, simply called Mound 72, was designed by the Cahokian so that one end of it faced the rising sun of the winter solstice, and the opposite end faced toward the setting sun of the summer solstice. An additional type of architecture in the Cahokia realm that fascinated the excavators who found it's remnants, are "wood hinges".

Labeled for a likeness to England's Stone-henge, the wood hinges are several circles with different diameters of hundreds of feet and are made up of posts at regular intervals. What is so amazing about them is that the number of posts in each circle are in multiples of 12 (24, 36, 48, 60, and 72). It is believed that the posts marked lunar cycles and other celestial arrangements. A further detail that proves Cahokia's eminence is most obviously the actual size and complex set-up of the settlement. During it's peak, circa 1100, Cahokia was populated by an estimated 10-20,000 people. These people lived in simple one-family homes, which in groups formed compounds, and several compounds made up communal plazas that were much like neighborhoods.

In the center of Cahokia was Monks mound, which was surrounded by temples and homes of nobility. Around this "Grand Plaza", was a stockade built of 20,000 logs for protection. Special buildings were also included in the Cahokian compounds and communal plazas. Each had buildings for the storage and cooking of food, meeting houses, and steam lodges for spiritual and physical cleansing, among other things. Like any great city has suburbs, Cahokia had satellite settlements which surrounded it.

These smaller communities, also made up of mounds, were influenced heavily by Cahokia. Lastly, a crucial element that argues Cahokia's true force on the primeval peoples of North America, are the large amounts of goods made of foreign resources found at the Cahokia site. Examples of this include, but are not limited to, copper from Lake Superior, mica from the East, and shells from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Also, as well as there being imported products in Cahokia, there are also Cahokian products and imitations of Cahokian products found on Native American sites all over the United States. As mighty as Cahokia was, the people there did not survive. By about 1400, the settlement was abandoned.

There are several ideas of why this happened, but nothing has been proved. Even so, there are things that have transcended the era of the Cahokian people, such as artifacts, bones, and of course the mounds, that aide our imaginations in visualizing the majesty of what was mighty Cahokia.