Cahokia’s Richland Farmers: Agricultural Expansion, Immigration, Ritual and the Foundations of Mississippian Civilization

FAIN: RZ-51769-14

Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)
Timothy Robert Pauketat (Project Director: January 2014 to August 2015)
Thomas E. Emerson (Project Director: August 2015 to August 2016)
Timothy Robert Pauketat (Project Director: August 2016 to December 2021)
Susan M. Alt (Co Project Director: January 2014 to December 2021)

Laboratory testing and interpretive analysis of artifacts collected at the Cahokian Richland Complex in Collinsville, Illinois, and for the preparation for publication of monographs, an article, an edited volume, and an online website exhibit. (36 months)

A team of researchers requests funding to complete the analysis of, write descriptive syntheses on, and enhance public and researcher access to the architecture and materials of four related 950-year-old settlements that hold the key to the rise of pre-Columbian North America’s one true city: Cahokia. Cahokia’s dramatic mid-11th century AD construction as a monumental capital, built by a diverse, rapidly urbanizing population of immigrants and locals, is a model for the rise of early civilizations everywhere. By isolating the region’s discrete subpopulations and tracking their activities around AD 1050, this proposal will result, for the first time, in a historically detailed understanding of how new agrarian relationships linked farming and farmers with other forces of the world in ways that underwrote Cahokia’s urbanism. Understanding how has a direct bearing on questions of global sustainability into the foreseeable future.

Associated Products

Greater Cahokia website (Web Resource)
Title: Greater Cahokia website
Author: Timothy R. Pauketat
Author: Susan M. Alt
Author: Thomas E. Emerson
Author: Laura Kozuch
Abstract: Presented here are a collaborative set of inquiries into the historical effects of a singular ancient Native American phenomenon--Cahokia. Our research seeks to understand (1) how the Cahokia that we can still see today came to be, some nine centuries ago, (2) how it changed the known human and nonhuman world of the Mississippi valley centuries ago, and (3) how it is relevant for our 21st century world.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.cahokia.illinois.edu/index.html
Primary URL Description: In 1990s-early 2000s, Principal Investigators Timothy Pauketat and Susan Alt began work in the Richland Complex, a Cahokia-related farming district in the upland hills east of Cahokia proper. Then, as now, the remains of the farming sites of people long past were under serious threat of destruction. Many were lost; more continue to be destroyed. Crews of students and volunteers excavated large portions of Cahokia-related farming settlements, a ritual-administrative complex, and a shrine complex. All of the remains from these excavations are currently under analysis, and are introduced here thanks to the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Secondary URL: http://www.cahokia.illinois.edu/richlandproject/index.html
Secondary URL Description: This page introduces the NEH funded study examining the relationship between Cahokia’s dramatic mid-11th century CE construction as a monumental capital and its diverse, rapidly urbanizing population of immigrants and locals. The precise causal connections between immigrant farmers, climate change, and religion are being delineated using eight highly productive salvage-archaeological field excavations in the 1990s and early 2000s at four sites east of the American Indian city of Cahokia.

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