The Fall Of Cahokia Summary

The myth of the Ecological Indian, has influenced historians’ beliefs for centuries. The thought that Native American’s were a part of nature, never exploiting their resources, a primitive species, a peaceful people, is a stereotype that is proven wrong by the paramount chiefdom of Cahokia. The stratified community, of what was in its day, a powerful unprecedented empire in North America, calls into question who Native Americans were believed to be. Cahokia, a Mississippian culture, is one of the first known empires started in North America, and Pax Cahokiana was the spread of Cahokian culture across the North American continent. In part, Pax Cahokiana was due to a time of relative peace among the people living in and surrounding Cahokia, this peace led to interaction, thus to cultural diffusion. Due to …show more content…
Dr. Rood shared that the author of the book introduced the fall of Cahokia in an intriguing way. Pauketat describes this through absence, emptiness, despair, catastrophe, as these people gradually disappeared from the area, until it was a ghost town, and a place of what use to be. Pauketat goes on to share that people left without any written accounts of what happened because, “maybe, by the twelfth century, people were seeking to escape Cahokia, and their desire to forget it – and create a more perfect, communal post-Cahokian society – were all a part of starting over.” This intriguing story is a seduction of civilizational collapse, but the truth can be found if one were to look at what was going on at the time. Cahokians were moving on to do better things with their lives. Outside villages began to move on to buffalo hunting, thus leaving Cahokia behind and ultimately giving up the jobs laboring for the community. Dr. Rood then shares that the fall of Cahokia was not necessarily a catastrophe or over exploitation, it was just another event in