Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi

Description

The fascinating story of a lost city and an unprecedented American civilization located in modern day Illinois near St. Louis While Mayan and Aztec civilizations are widely known and documented, relatively few people are familiar with the largest prehistoric Native American city north of Mexico-a site that expert Timothy Pauketat brings vividly to life in this groundbreaking book. Almost a thousand years ago, a city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Built around a sprawling central plaza and known as Cahokia, the site has drawn the attention of generations of archaeologists, whose work produced evidence of complex celestial timepieces, feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of human sacrifice. Drawing on these fascinating finds, Cahokia presents a lively and astonishing narrative of prehistoric America.

Timothy R. Pauketat is an Americanarchaeologistand professor of anthropology at theUniversity of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. After earninga BS inanthropologyand earth sciences fromSouthern Illinois University Edwardsville, he worked as a staff archaeologist at theCenter for American Archaeology. Pauketat is best known for hisresearch onCahokia, the center of the large, regional Mississippian culture that extended throughout the Mississippi Valley and tributaries.

"A happy marriage of professional scholarship and childlike enthusiasm." -- Kirkus Reviews "Page by page, Pauketat compiles the fascinating details of a complex archeological puzzle; explaining the study of cross-cultural goddess worship, cave art, hand tools and games, this volume doubles as a crash-course in the archeological method." -- Publishers Weekly "In "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi," Timothy R. Pauketat tells the story of the mounds, from what archeologists have been able to discover about their origins nearly a thousand years ago to their near destruction and partially successful preservation in the modern age."-- The Wall Street Journal