Annalee Newitz: Finding North America’s lost medieval city
A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region’s tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.
At the city’s apex in 1100, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, bigger than London or Paris at the time. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose along the eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading across the river to St. Louis.
From Ars Technica — Annalee Newitz: Finding North America’s lost medieval city
Don’t recall any of this in my American history class. Fascinating.Report
Settled civilizations existed in North America to. The Native Americans were less rustic than most people thing. The Amazon Rain Forest also has a lot of ruins showing human tinkering with the environment. It might have supported a population of five million before contact with the Europeans. Five million.Report
Five Million? That’s peanuts. Really, it is. 300 million in America, and that’s not even really thickly populated.Report
Well, we do have the benefit of the most advanced and extensive industrialization the world has yet seen. That tends to boost population levels. Five million pre-industrial people in a particular geographic area is pretty impressive. Which is why I’m so impressed with the city described in the linked article — thirty thousand urban pre-industrial people suggests a high level of cultural sophistication and environmental know-how. In fact, it seems they had very little metal, and yet were still able to support a city of that size.Report
England:
1300: 5,500,000 (Source: John Langdon and James Masschaele, “Commercial Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England”, p. 65)
I’m pretty sure the Amazon RainForest is about 50 times the area of england.
Sparsely populated, I say.
(and yes, North America had far better capacity than the Amazonian Rainforest. People live better (and are smarter) at particular temperatures — see Carrier’s research on the subject).Report
There is evidence copper was previously traded heavily in the area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Copper_Complex
Processing stone to make/maintain basic tools can be relatively efficient and fast.
The item that suprises me is the use of stone in agricultural tools, but considering it’s mostly soft clay, I can see why they went that route.Report
Compared to the number of Native Americans that we previously believed lived in the Amazon before contact, somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands, five million is staggering. It suggests that the hi-ball figures for pre-contact numbers is correct and the death caused by contact with humans one of the biggest genocides in human history.Report
Excellent comment.Report
@leeesq
“…the death caused by contact with humans one of the biggest genocides in human history.”
I would caution you on two items:
1) The population totals of pre-Columbian American Indians are highly disputed. They range widely because it is extremely hard to verify for any number of reasons. Not saying your number is wrong, but historians have been disagreeing about this for decades.
2) Deaths from diseases do not qualify as ‘genocide’. That’s an important distinction to make when considering the history of European/American Indian contact.Report
Mike,
Deaths from diseases don’t count as genocide unless the disease is deliberately disseminated for that purpose.Report
Correct – and before anyone gets out their tinfoil, that wasn’t a thing.Report
Except for those smallpox blankets.
And some idiots in the Middle East right now (still unsuccessful).Report
I’m going to assume you are joking about the blankets.Report
Okay. I’m apparently the idiot who listened and didn’t realize that I had the whole history wrong.
You’re wrong too, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics
Fort Pitt, of all places, and verified documentation showing the planning.
Or I could talk of the deliberate use of fecal matter in Jerusalem, but that’s less genocide and more biological terrorism.Report
Fort Pitt could be considered biological warfare, but it was completely different circumstances and ultimately failed. When people talk genocide they are usually referring to some kind of planned process that crossed centuries, which is what I am pushing back against.
And I should also correct myself that Lee doesn’t specifically reference disease. When he says ‘contact’ that could mean any number of things.Report
Hitler committed genocide against the Jews in under a decade. That’s what I generally consider the gold standard when referencing genocide.
If you’re going to go to “centuries long warfare” … well, at a certain point, everything was genocide (then they invented slavery, and things got a bit better for the losers).Report
Actually, if we’re going to give a gold standard, it should probably go to Hitler and Stalin both for what they did in a decade and a half in the Baltic states.Report
Whatever happened at Fort Pitt, and it is disputed, it had nothing to do with Native American demographic collapse. Most likely this was due to disease spread before the first European settlement.Report
Sure. The Spaniards, using their sixteenth-century epidemiology, decided to pretend to conquer and convert the natives because they…eh, I got nothing.Report
I live 100 miles from the site and have been there multiple times. Interestingly, but not surprising, relatively few people visit from Illinois; the usual visitor comes from afar or other countries. One of the things I like about the interpretive center is that at the end of the exhibits it gives the visitors to select what they believe happened.
My two cents. Last year findings were published from analysis of nearby lake sediment cores, showing that the depopulation of Cahokia corresponded with a major flood event. The site was within a flood plain, and as the city and its suburbs grew and the intensity of maize agriculture increased (through burning of the river valley vegetation), the limitations of the bottomland were vulnerable to such a flood. (It could have been made worse if it is true as some believe that the Cahokians diverted a creek to the central area, a significant engineering feat).
The opposing view given mention in the piece is that correlation does not equal causation, and someone dug some holes and couldn’t find flood debris. That doesn’t refute the evidence preserved in the nearby lake of major flooding; it merely indicates that either flooding did not occur in those spots or the evidence of flooding was not preserved there.Report
I noticed there was no mention of disease. Usually in a cascade failure disease is one of the parameters that moves along the collapse. This situation may be one of the few that wasn’t a quick downfall, just a relatively slow depopulation.Report
I’ve not heard a lot about disease, but certainly decline could have multiple contributing factors. It was larger than London, which had disease problems, but the impression I have is that Cahokia was nowhere near as dense. There are large open spaces/ promenades that may have served ritual purposes, some parts of Cahokia might be characterized as suburbs, and there were farms and orchards nearby. This may have led to less sanitation-originating diseases.Report
Cahokia is a fantastic site, and one I wish I had time to visit more regularly (only a few hours from Louisville). You can still climb one of the largest mounds. I’ll echo @pd-shaw by saying the visitor’s center is fantastic. Interestingly, many early scholars in the the United States (including Thomas Jefferson) believed the mound-builders to be another race (lost tribe of Israel?) because they did not think American Indians were capable of that kind of work.
One of the things that I think is very unfortunate is how few people understand the complex and rich history of American Indians in what would become the United States, especially in the Eastern U.S. You have a very robust Mississippian culture from roughly 800 CE to 1600 CE. It was a fascinating period. I’ve been very lucky to work at and visit some of those sites.
As a native of Kentucky, I’ve always loved the Eastern tribes, but they mostly get ignored. Even the American Indian Museum in Washington DC mostly fails with the Eastern tribes. We are so indoctrinated in Hollywood’s idea of the American Indian…headress-wearing Plains Indians…that people just assume they were all like that. Some movies still do them justice (Jeremiah Johnson, Last of the Mohicans) but I wish there was more . It saddens me greatly to see the remnant tribes (Shawnee, Cherokee, etc) that have adopted this very generic ‘Indian’ culture that in no way reflects their history.
Sorry. I’ll get off my soapbox now…. Just to repeat though, Cahokia is awesome and worth a visit if you like that kind of stuff.Report
@mike-dwyer
Have you read 1491? The Stuff You Should Know guys reference it often. Would be curious to hear your take if you have, especially w/r/t readability for a history layperson.Report
I have read it – and it’s a very good overview of American Indian tribes pre-European contact.Report
@kazzy 1491 is bloody fantastic.
(Mann’s 1493 is also pretty damn good.)Report
1491 has a section on Cahokia. Charles Mann wrote the book with the generalist in mind based upon more specialized reading that he found wasn’t breaking into public awareness: specifically on issues of Indian demography, Indian origins, and Indian technology. And I like that he gives different points-of-view when there are reasonable differences.Report
@pd-shaw @mike-dwyer @tod-kelly
Thanks!Report
The main thing contributing to people not paying to Eastern tribes is, imo, the out of sight, out of mind. The Eastern tribes have a sliver of a fraction of both the population and the sovereign territory that tribes West of the Mississippi river have (for well known historical reasons). Even among the federally recognized Eastern tribes, that recognition came comparatively late – the only federally recognized tribe in Virginia was only granted that status last year.Report
@kolohe
Absolutely agree. They were moved out much earlier, and despite their names lingering on in parks, school names, towns, etc…most people have no visual sense of what they were like.Report
I have a big pet peave with comparing medival London and Paris to cities in the other part of the world. Both of them weren’t first rank centers in Europe until late in the middle ages. Paris starts becoming a big deal in the 13th century, while medieval London was never even a first rate urban center in the English Channel region (being considerably smaller than the Flemish cities like Bruges and Ghent).
As a rule of thumb, if someone is making a historical comparison to London at the same age, they are probably trying to pull wool over your eyes about how impressive that urban area is compared to the rest of the world at that time.Report
Noted. Will pull some numbers for the Hanseatic League, simply because you’ve made me curious.Report
A valid point, one to take into account. In 1100 the European cities one would have found more impressive would have been Constantinople, Venice, or in Moorish Spain.
With that said, I take the comparison to London and Paris a bit differently: it’s an invitation to consider what might have been. If London and Paris grew from towns of ten to twenty thousand souls each into globally important megalopolises, each able to state a reasonable claim for “Caput Mundi” at some point in their histories, what would things have been like had Cahoika been able to follow a similar path?Report
That’s a valid point, but its likewise important to consider that the societies Paris and London sprung from were unusually rural based for their level of technoligical and social sophistication. The Latin Catholic culture that sprung up under the Franks and spread outward focused its growth on villages and small towns. Thus when economic conditions began to favour large cities in W. Europe (roughly 13th century at eariliest but it really started going in the 15th) they shot up like weeds due to the huge spare capacity for urbanization that had been built up.Report