Pax Cahokia Analysis

In his notorious book , Dr. Pauketat explains Cahokia and concentrates on how Cahokia affected various cultures throughout the central North America. Cahokia was considered the center of the regional Mississippian culture that covered most parts of the Mississippian Valley. The author introduces Pax Cahokiana as a culture of people and materials that had a significant influence to the different regions of North America. In his creditable analysis, Dr. Pauketat explains the rise of Pax Cahokiana, highlighting its political connections to the greater Mississippian world, how Pax Cahokia was maintained, and what happened to it before the arrival of Europeans during 800-1300 CE. The pre-Columbian establishment, Cahokia, was the largest and most powerful city in North America and approximately twenty thousand people populated the area. The author makes a point that Cahokia’s construction required multiple workers and manual labor and that shows us that Cahokia itself was an organized and unified society. In the city of Cahokia, a different culture started to breed among the people and I believe its one inspired by Mesoamericans. Cahokians navigated the cosmos in the same way as Mesoamericans; they also spread stories about superhuman individuals, and practiced human sacrifice similar to Mesoamericans. The people of Cahokia became more advanced by creating a unique way of living that involves maize agriculture. This caused their new way of living to spread throughout the South with stronger religious roots than before. Dr. Pauketat refers to this new culture as Mississippian. Numerous groups of people situated themselves along the river and primarily used it for travelling and resources. The most important growth-driver of the newly adopted civilization is that certain Cahokians had chunkey stones in one hand and war clubs in the other …show more content…
“The first reason is the presence of Cahokian settlers, colonist and migrants between about A.D 1050 and 1200”(Timothy R. Pauketat. Cahokia. 155). Secondly, it appears that there are ear ornaments, pots, material objects and smoking pipes in places as far as the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma (see map). Before it was believed that Cahokians might have given smoking pipes and ear ornaments to their political affiliations as gifts. My third reason is that there is evidence of violence in Midwestern places more so than in domestic groups. This may have been unlike the pre-Mississippian-style, and it was also unlike the large-scale village raiding seen in the Upper Midwest after A.D. 1200, when Pax Cahokiana presumably disappeared (Pauketat, Caho. 156). For that specific reason I believe that Cahokians and that their allied communities maintained peace and order in the Upper Mississippi Valley through planned force against groups that did not obey rules in their …show more content…
Pauketat’s view of Cahokia’s remembrance rests upon his knowledge and understanding of Cahokia as a city that had the potential of enforcing political power as well as military power across the plains and woodlands. My understanding is that Cahokians continued a “Pax Cahokiana”, and without the city’s enforcement of military power, the plains and woodlands started acting violent and became rebellious (Pauketat, Caho.168). The next Woodland Indians generation drew upon a Cahokian cultural legacy and because of that the city “also affected the shape and direction of European colonization and, later, America’s westward expansion” (Pauketat, Caho. 38-39). According to the author, Cahokia’s most famous act was in its collapse and he sees the city as “pre-Columbian America’s experiment in civilization” (Pauketat,