The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

The Collapse of Urban Centers 11

An artist’s rendering shows downtown Cahokia, around 1150 CE. Cahokia was surrounded by a palisade, made of enormous tree trunks (far left).
On the great mounds within, the elite built homes and performed the ceremonial tasks of Mississippian culture. The open space in the center
was probably filled with the stalls of craftspeople.

figurines and copper or, in times of famine, grants of
surplus corn. In Cahokia, too, priest-astronomers scru-
tinized the movements of the sun, moon, and stars.
Cahokia dominated a region of several hundred
miles. Smaller mound-building communities emerged
throughout the eastern woodlands and the Southeast.
Two of the largest were Moundville, Alabama, and
Etowah, Georgia. Cahokia also established (or per-
haps inspired) distant satellite communities. Around
AD 800, Mississippian Indians moved into southern
Wisconsin and built Aztalan (in what is now Jefferson
County), with similar corn storage depots and large
ceremonial mounds surrounding a central plaza.
Like Cahokia, Aztalan erected a massive tree-
trunk palisade with watchtowers. Archaeologists have
found burned and butchered body parts throughout
the ruins, evidence of warfare. Some speculate that
the corn-growing Mississippians encroached on the
Oneota, a hunting and gathering people, and that the
communities long remained hostile.
The Mississippian elites did more than supervise
construction of their own massive earthen tombs.
They also solved complicated problems of political
and social organization.

Reconstructed View of Cahokiaat
myhistorylab.com

The Collapse of Urban Centers

Yet Cahokia and Aztalan soon declined. By AD
1200, Cahokia’s population had been reduced to
several thousand people; by AD 1350, it was
deserted. Etowah and Moundville went into decline
somewhat later.
The major towns and villages of the Southwest
civilizations faded as well. By AD 1200, the inhabi-
tants of Chaco Canyon had vanished and nearly all of

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the pueblos of the Anasazi had been abandoned.

Snaketown and dozens of towns of the Hohokam had

become empty ruins, their canals choked with weeds.

What caused the collapse of these communities

has long been a source of debate. Some scholars cite

protracted droughts during the 1200s and 1300s.

Others note that population growth harmed the envi-

ronment. Slash-and-burn wood clearance thinned the

eastern forests, and corn cultivation exhausted the

soil. Archaeologists have determined that each

Cahokian house required eighty large wooden

posts—a half million for the entire city. The palisade at

Cahokia consisted of thousands of the trunks of fully

grown trees, and it was repeatedly rebuilt. Denuded

of big trees, the watershed around Cahokia became

susceptible to erosion and flooding, further depleting

exhausted topsoils.

The farming Indians of the Southwest also

stripped their lands of trees for fuel and for house and

This pre-Anasazi community in Mesa Verde, Colorado, was carved

into a cliff, making it nearly impregnable to attackers.