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A whole city aligned with the cosmos! The idea reverberates with
expressive power. The stars in the heavens shine radiantly; they are
constant in both position and movement; they appear with reassuring
regularity generation after generation. The North Star orients a hunter
in the forest so he can find his way home. The moon lights his way in
the darkness. The Pleiades promise a frost-free growing season. Our
orbit around the sun brings four seasons, from spring to winter,
echoing the life cycle of a person from youth to old age, with the
promise of continuity in new generations.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
the principal mounds in the center are aligned with Monks Mound
and with each other. Seven mounds are lined up north-south in line
with the west edge of Monks Mound. Another eight align with the
east edge. Nine mounds are on an east-west line across the site and
line up with Monks Mound.
A setting for mythic rituals. Majestic mounds and four plazas mark the cardinal directions, a reflection of the cosmos in the heart of the midwestern prairie.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
With its plazas aligned on the cardinal directions and the mound of
greatest height at the crossing of the plazas, it is clear that Cahokia is
a landscape cosmogram. John E. Kelly advocates looking for an
explanation by approaching the question from both ends of a
chronological continuum. Did other Native American communities
create any analogous sacred landscape before the Cahokians? After
the Cahokians? The answer is yes to both questions. We know the
Hopewell circle-and-octagon mounds were used for sacred
ceremonies and for astronomical observations. We have seen the
evidence of a solar calendar at Poverty Point about 1500 B.C.
Another pre-Cahokia example is the McKeithen site at Weeden Island
in northern Florida, occupied between A.D. 200 and 700. Here three
mounds form the corners of an isosceles triangle, and a perpendicular
from the center of the baseline to the apex points toward the rising
sun at the summer solstice.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
sacred geography.
An ordinary day in a sacred city. Life at Cahokia was filled with workers going about daily activities and the tasks of house building in the
shadows of the tall mounds occupied by the elite.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
This four-part horizontal division of the world (into north, east, south,
and west) plus a three-part vertical division (into lower world, this
world, and upper world) was also reflected in the ritual behavior of
the Zuni around their religious shrines.
Humans all over the globe have wanted height in their symbolic
religious places, and the Cahokians solved the problem of their flat
topography by creating enormous earth mounds. Where there were no
natural heights, they created architectural heights to fill their spiritual
needs.
Height is also a metaphor for power, and the Cahokian elite were
powerful people. Conveniently, and not coincidentally, height served
the personal-communal need for a sacred place and also the social-
political need for a statement of civil order and a method of civil
control. Tall structures are imposing. They demand to be noticed,
respected, sometimes feared. If they are taller than the structures of a
rival tribe, city, culture, or nation, they are also emblems of victory,
trophies symbolizing the possession of the best engineering,
architecture, social, and military organization and the greatest wealth.
Tall structures demonstrate vigor and success. They show the
surrounding world that the inhabitants are big, bold, and in command.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
A Microcosm on Earth
The Midwest not only lacked natural heights, it was also devoid of
limits, borders, or boundaries. Most often compared to an ocean of
grass, the prairies too could be terrifyingly vast. Within the wild
forests that bordered them the confusion could be equally
disorienting. The microcosm on earth, the mound city, calmed by
mirroring the cosmos as it clarified and ordered human experience,
giving it a meaning it would otherwise not have.
The human place in the cosmos is situated along two vectors, the
horizontal and the vertical, and given scale as well as scope by the
insertion of geometric shapes. Here in this broad land is our place in
the horizontal sense. Here is the protected place; beyond is the place
where we can travel, have adventures, and yet always return to an
oriented place because the mounds do not move. The sun and the
stars move, but the mounds always stay where they are.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
Estimates for the hours of labor needed just for the palisade and its
regularly placed bastions are an illuminating example of the time
required for large structures. Nearly twenty thousand logs are needed
for the kind of stockade fence that surrounded central Cahokia. A
person with a stone ax can fell two nine-inch-diameter trees in an
hour, meaning that 10,000 work hours would be needed just to obtain
the raw material. Sizing, trimming, and debarking would require
another one to two hours per tree. Transporting all the logs from the
forest to the site takes more labor. Excavating the trenches for the
foundation adds about 20,800 hours. The labor of erecting the posts,
backfilling the trench around them with soil, tamping down the fill,
collecting and preparing cordage and ropes to lash or interweave the
supports with cross members, and other finishing operations such as
mixing and applying daub plaster (which could make logs last longer)
brings the total to nearly 180,000 work hours. Under ideal conditions
(good weather, accessibility of timber, a sizable workforce, and ease
of transportation) it would take two thousand men a week to build a
palisade. But it probably took much longer.
Some useful numbers also help us grasp the enormous effort that goes
into making a structure the size of Monks Mound with human labor.
This pharaonic enterprise required carrying 14,666,666 baskets, each
filled with 1.5 cubic feet of dirt, weighing about fifty-five pounds
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
Erecting a woodhenge. A solar calendar of the sun's movement helped determine when to hold
ceremonies in preparation for planting, harvesting, and other events in the agricultural cycle and
marked the all-important spring and fall equinox celebrations.
In this way powerful chiefs and their affiliated ruling class could
perpetuate their control and position. By associating themselves with
the power of the sky they provided celestial legitimacy for their
status, and by erecting a monumental city around them they
perpetuated the belief system and their own place at the top of the
social, religious, and political hierarchy. In addition, the system
ensured public safety.
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Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerpt 30/04/2020, 21:28
Copyright notice: Excerpted from pages 51-65 of Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos by Sally A. Kitt Chappell, published by
the University of Chicago Press. ©2002 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared
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See also:
The website for Cahokia Mounds State Park
A Cahokia Mounds website at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Our catalog of Native American studies titles
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