As Chekilli and others suggested in their stories, towns were old. They might move or reconfigure themselves, but their square grounds had been defining and celebrating the southeastern cosmos for centuries. But this way of life, like Chekilli’s ancestors, had come from somewhere, and that somewhere lay at the American Bottom, where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers join to create a fertile bottomland and where the city of Cahokia grew some time after 900 c.e. Still today, the city’s imposing Monk’s Mound rises thirty meters above the outskirts of East St. Louis, covering roughly seven hectares at its base.11 This was among the largest of hundreds of truncated pyramids that punctuated the landscape of the American Bottom. The leaders who lived, worshiped, and were sometimes buried atop these mounds enjoyed ties of exchange with societies for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Stored up surpluses of corn fed the people who maintained these monuments. More than large, Cahokia was unprecedented. In 1050 its population of eight thousand to fifteen thousand dwarfed any North American population center before Boston, New York, and Philadelphia reached similar sizes some seven centuries later.12
Unlike prior residents of eastern North America, Cahokia’s builders planned their community before they built it. Some time around 1000, in one massive act of what the archaeologist Timothy Pauketat calls “urban renewal,” Cahokians leveled a nineteen-hectare grand plaza and constructed the first six meters of Monk’s Mound immediately to the north of the plaza. Residents even built their houses according to a prescribed layout that probably mobilized the same collective effort as the plaza and mound.13 Equally important, this growing city promoted and depended upon an exchange network that allowed it to acquire marine shells from the Gulf Coast, copper from the Great Lakes, chert from the Ozarks, and mica from the Appalachian Mountains. From these materials Cahokian craftsmen and craftswomen made idols, tools, and ceramics that became prestigious goods exchanged throughout the Mississippi Valley. Whether peoples from the upper Great Lakes to the Mississippi Delta accepted Cahokian crafts as tributaries, allies, or outlying Cahokian trading colonies is unclear, but their participation in these exchanges enabled Cahokians to define themselves and their power in the American Bottom in terms of the peoples who lived far beyond its horizons.14 Such contacts promoted but could not guarantee Cahokian influence, however. Between 1100 and 1300 environmental degradation, internal and external conflicts, and deepening popular dissatisfaction with the city’s elite all contributed to Cahokia’s collapse.15
The great city’s legacy was far greater than even its unprecedented size would suggest. Archaeologists acknowledge its impact in their terminology. Cahokia is the standard against which they define the successor societies called chiefdoms, societies whose leaders enjoyed marked privileges compared to the commoners they ruled but who also depended on personal connections and hereditary privileges rather than bureaucracies or standing armies—institutions frequently associated with states. Mississippian chiefdoms distinguished themselves from the earlier polities most obviously in their construction of planned towns, earthen mounds, and plazas. Atop their mounds, chiefs lived, preserved their sacred fires, and celebrated communal rituals with townspeople gathered in the plaza below. When townspeople gathered to add a new layer of soil to their mounds, they affirmed their connection to one another as well as to the earth. Because most layers were added following the interment of a principal leader, mound construction also expressed a community’s connection to (and elevation of ) its chief. As Chekilli would have understood well, no mound and no chief existed without an associated town. However wide his ties to other farming hamlets, tributary towns, or allies, a chief resided in one particular town, where he consulted other members of the elite and conducted the ceremonies of cosmic order.16 Not surprisingly, even after southeastern Natives ceased to define their communities through mound building, powerful chiefs, and tributary ties, they still placed their towns at the political and ceremonial heart of their world. Towns and the exchanges that supported them began with Cahokia and endured long after Zamumo and de Soto offered each other tokens of friendship and power.17
No southeastern community would ever reproduce Cahokia’s size or success, but many would imitate it. By 1100, peoples of Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Tennessee began building new town and mound centers of their own.18 Archaeologists still understand relatively little about the early Mississippian societies of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, and it is difficult to determine what role regional exchange played in their fortunes. By the thirteenth century, however, their successors participated in complex networks of exchange that stretched across and beyond the Southeast. Mississippian exchange provided leaders from Georgia to Oklahoma with beautifully crafted objects of copper, shell, and stone that were inscribed with a sacred iconography of bird-men, snake-birds, and other deities who blended the power of various animals and the elements of earth, air, and water.19
Map 1. The Mississippian Southeast, 1000–1500. Although these various chiefdoms were not contemporaneous, later communities built upon their cultural, and sometimes physical, remains.
After 1200, residents of the Black Warrior River Valley in western Alabama used their place in these networks to build a Mississippian center second only to Cahokia in size. Although Moundville’s population of some fifteen hundred to three thousand people was a fraction of Cahokia’s, its leaders were especially effective at harnessing the dynamics of exchange and ceremony to their own quests for influence. By gaining control of the production and distribution of the finely crafted ceramics, copper ornaments, and other symbols of power, Moundville’s chiefs maintained close contact with and control over neighbors who depended on these objects for their authority. By the end of the thirteenth century, peoples as far north as the Tennessee River recognized the power of Moundville and its sacred crafts, and scattered villages and hamlets began to replace more densely clustered towns in the Black Warrior Valley. Perhaps people dispersed in part because Moundville’s power reduced valley residents’ need for dense settlements with protective walls, but whatever the reason, this pax Moundvilliana incorporated the persuasive power of what its leaders gave and received.20
Meanwhile, between about 1250 and 1375, chiefs in western Georgia were attempting something similar. Leaders of Etowah, in northwestern Georgia, gained influence over much of the rest of the eponymous river valley, oversaw the construction of beautiful crafts, and placed these objects and themselves atop three mounds, one of which eventually grew to 21 meters in height. Etowah supported some of its influence through its access to an important route that connected chiefdoms of the Gulf Coast, Chattahoochee River, and upper Tennessee River.21 Two hundred forty kilometers south of Etowah, elites in the Chattahoochee Valley constructed similarly large centers at Rood’s Landing and Singer-Moye thanks in part to their association with prestigious goods, including the exchange of fine pottery used by elites from the Gulf Coast to the Chattahoochee fall line. Unlike the case of Moundville, it is unclear whether inhabitants of the valley produced these ceramics in their respective towns or acquired them from one town that monopolized their production. Much like their contemporaries at Moundville, though, the leaders of Singer-Moye and Rood’s Landing believed that the ideas and symbols of power were best shared regionally. Leaders from the Gulf Coast to Rood’s Landing 250 kilometers to the north drank from similarly decorated ceramics. Indeed, the relative similarity among commoners’ pottery styles for 90 kilometers south of Rood’s Landing further suggests how many people participated in the connections that bound the Mississippian world.22
The political and cultural integration among elites and, to a lesser extent, commoners did not last much beyond the end of the fourteenth century, when the global cooling of the “Little Ice Age” reduced the crop yields that supported these large chiefdoms. Moundville’s scattered population ceased using nearly all of the mounds in the once-great town at about this time. To the northeast, external threats convinced the people of Etowah to ring their town with a trench and palisade, but new defenses could not prevent invaders from burning Etowah’s palisade and desecrating its temple around 1400. Survivors abandoned the site shortly afterward. The residents of Rood’s Landing also abandoned their mound center at about the same time. Only residents of Singer-Moye managed to maintain