Posts Tagged Mississippians

Cahokia – the cherry upon the icing of the Mississippian cake.

31 August 2011
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It was settled around the 7th century, gradually evolving into a great urban center, populated more densely than London of the same time. For decades thousands of workers had shifted more than 55 million cubic feet of earth, building a great network of mounds and ceremonial plazas.

Over 120 mounds spread through the busy, bubbling, noisy city, with its crowded neighborhoods, smelly marketplaces and the multitude of different-size pyramids, some ridge-top for the burial purposes, some flat, platform-top for the ceremonial ones. The deceased rulers would be buried there, placed in a bed of the thousands marine shells, arranged sacredly in a form of this or that deity, with a treasure of many valuables – arrowheads, copper jewelry and, sometimes, a pile of sacrificial victims.

Wooden stockade, fortified with watchtowers, enclosed the important, ceremonial center of the city, separating the nobility from the lower classes. The neighborhood of the elite has to be kept quiet, cherished and protected. The royal Great Mound, ten storey tall, spacious and terraced, hosted main temples and the large dwelling of the ruler, who was tracing his dynasty to the Sun God himself. In order to protect the purity of the bloodline, the throne would always pass from the Ruler to his nephew, the son of his blood sister. No mortal noblewoman, married to the descendant of the Sun God, chaste as she might appear, could be trusted with delivering a pure blood next ruler.

Artificially made, adjacent Grand Plaza of almost 40 acres served for ceremonies and games, along with the smaller plazas, encircling the Great Mound. And, of course, astronomical observations were have to be conducted, in order to appease the gods properly. To the west of the Great Mound, Woodhenge – a circle of poles – served to track the movements of the major stars, marking mainly the solstices and the equinoxes.

Cahokia declined toward the 14th century. It may have begun with the climate changes that have, probably, affected the whole region, up to the west coast (approximately around this time, Anasazi had also abandoned their Great Houses in Arizona and Colorado canyons). It may be that the Cahokians themselves helped to affect the climate, deforesting the area unmercifully. Or maybe in such a large, densely populated urban center (up to 40,000 residents at its height) the diseases began to spread, thinning the population out.
Whatever the reason, Cahokia was no more, long before the first contact with the Europeans was made.

The New World has never been discovered

27 July 2011
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The discovery of the New World, which was fortunate for some and very unfortunate for the others, had never happened on this small piece of the internet territory.

On the Oct. 12, 1492, the lookout of the caravel Pinta, Rodrigo de Triana, napped on, dreaming about his sweet little home in Seville, while the caravel swept by the misty costs of Guanahani (the Bahamas), not noticing anything out of an ordinary. Or, maybe, a month earlier, leaving the Canary islands, the three caravels turned anywhere but westwards. Or maybe a storm…

This or that way, the so-called Americas were never “discovered” and the coastal waters of the Bahamas continued glittering placidly on the sunny morning of Oct 13, while the Lucayan, Taino and Arawak people went about their usual business.
The Yucatan city states kept flourishing, having thrown off their Mayapan rulers and to their west the Aztecs’ Triple Alliance went on expanding, raiding the neighboring Tarascan Empire, while instituting more reforms separating between the classes.
In North America, the Anasazi descendants were slowly recovering from the Great Drought period, developing irrigation techniques appropriate for a seasonal rainfall and fighting off their newly acquired Navajo neighbors. And to their east, all along the Mississippi and its tributaries, the small towns of the Mississippians descendants tried to live on, according to their illustrious ancestors’ rules, surrounded by the multitude of great and small mounds, the remnants of the glorious past, green with a thick layer of an autumn, water-soaked grass.

Both regions lived in a relative peace, less familiar to their celebrated ancestors. But in the north the Great League of the Iroquois was expanding, flourishing under the wise laws of the Great Peacemaker, fighting their neighbors and spreading their un-heard of democracy far and wide.

And so the 15th century had ended and the 16th had begun, with both Americas living on undisturbed.

But this premise belongs to historical fantasy, while I’m engaged with historical fiction, so my current novel and the ones to come are all about the pre-Columbian past of this beautiful continent.