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At first blush, this distinction may seem trivial. After
all, in both reconstructions Cahokia was the mound center of
a complex chiefdom which clearly interacted with other
groups both within and outside of the American Bottom. But
this distinction has significant ramifications for
understanding many aspects of Mississippian society,
culture, and lifeways in the American Bottom. Moreover, the
character and complexity of American Bottom
chiefdoms has profound implications for understanding the
evolution, function, and demise of Cahokia.
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The alternative model argues that the American Bottom
supported several quasi-independent, but Cahokia-dominated,
chiefdoms throughout the Mississippian Period. In this
conservative model, Mississippian developments in the
American Bottom did not involve a wholesale restructuring of
society where Cahokia administrative institutions and
functionaries implemented directives from the Cahokia
paramount chief on smaller communities. Rather, the rise of
the Cahokia-dominated complex chiefdom involved little more
than the establishment of ties between the most important people(chiefs and their close kin) among the various chiefly
elites and that of Cahokia. Thus, this regional sociopolitical system, sometimes called a complex chiefdom, was little more than a linked series of simple chiefdoms, each of which was allied to the most powerful of them all, Cahokia. In this view, each Mississippian
chiefdom in the American Bottom maintained a measure of
independence from Cahokia. Thus, similar socio-political and
religious manifestations between sites in the American
Bottom are related to overall similarities in Mississippian
culture and are not a consequence of directives from
Cahokia. While dominant, Cahokia developed in a cultural
landscape where competing chiefdoms rose and fell of their
over time.
Accordingly, the conservative model views the demise of Cahokia as a consequence of a highly competitive and unstable social system in which household independence promoted by farming was mirrored in the shifting alliances among chiefdoms and a lack of integration into a monolithic Cahokia polity. As such, the conservative model of the Cahokia chiefdom argues that Cahokia's decline involved a weakening and ultimately severing of the ties that previously linked the economically self-sufficient and politically quasi-autonomous parts of the complex chiefdom. In short, the conservative model is a bottom-up approach to understanding culture change. |