Was the mound-building settlement of Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis, the seat of a small state or a jumbo-sized chiefdom? Experts gathered at SFI May 28-30 to try to settle the matter.
The question is important because one of the first steps in figuring out how all states emerged from their societal precursors is establishing just which ancient settlements actually qualify as states. A state is significantly more complex than a chiefdom, with at least three layers of political hierarchy and technological specialization, among other features.
These complexities usually arise whenever a settlement reaches a certain size. But there are a couple of cases where it’s not clear statehood happened. One such outlier is Cahokia.
“It’s really big, but it’s always described as a chiefdom,” says SFI External Professor Peter Peregrine, a professor of anthropology at Lawrence University. It’s judged to have been a city of 3,000 to 10,000 people, with 6,000 to 40,000 in the surrounding region. But despite being one of the most extensively excavated and studied archaeological sites in North America, the jury is still out on Cahokia.
“A lot of questions remain,” says Peregrine. “Was this one big urban landscape? How was this whole thing organized? Given the apparent scale of Cahokia, you’d think that it had a higher level of organization.”
To try to settle the matter, Peregrine and SFI Omidyar Fellow Scott Ortman and Postdoctoral Fellow Eric Rupley invited nine Cahokia experts to Santa Fe in late May to meet face-to-face and begin to hash it out.
“It’s a small community of scholars that communicate a lot,” says Peregrine.
The emergence of the state is the focus of a three-year research project under way at SFI, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
See the May 2013 SFI Bulletin for a detailed look at this research