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Grand Plaze at Cahokia - the center of an integrated complex chiefdom?


The traditional model of a highly integrated, complex chiefdom with all power emanating from Cahokia requires a radical restructuring of earlier societies. According to this model less powerful chiefs throughout the American Bottom were quickly and totally supplanted by the Cahokia elite by the Stirling Phase, if not somewhat earlier (perhaps the Lohmann phase). After that time, all socio-political and religious functions were determined by the Cahokia elite; their directives were passed down to their subordinates in outlying communities through well-defined religious and political institutions via civic and religious specialists. Accordingly, the traditional model views the demise of Mississippian society throughout the American Bottom as a direct result of the collapse of Cahokia itself. In short, the traditional model is a top-down approach to understanding culture change.

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.


Cahokia and other Mississippian sites in and near the American Bottom

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.


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