![]() The winner was the one whose spear stuck nearest to the chunkey stone, like a massive game of bocce played with deadly projectiles. Taut with focus, hundreds of athletes hurled their spears even as the stone still bounced and rolled. The game kicked off when a player rolled a stone disk across the smooth surface of the ground. On the plaza, the crowd's buzzing energy turned to a collective roar when spectators bet on bouts of chunkey. Visitors would sleep in temporary housing or the homes of friends, heading to the plaza for dances, blessings and other events. Stockpiles of wild game, berries, fruits and vegetables became shared feasts. For days, food and drink would be carried into the city, where a phalanx of cooks fed people arriving for the festivities. "It's hard to capture the intensity, the grandeur, the multi-dimensionality of an event like that," Pauketat said. Most spectacular of all was the 50-acre Grand Plaza, where 10,000 or more people could come together for celebrations in a monumental space flanked by earthen pyramids. In Four Lost Cities, Newitz writes that Cahokia's planners crafted structures and public spaces devoted entirely to mass gatherings, places where individuals would be swept up by the joy of collective experiences. Lidar scans of the site have revealed elevated causeways linking the "neighbourhoods" of the living and the dead, physical walkways that literally joined the realms.Īnd if living at the cusp of the two worlds sounds rather sombre, Cahokians seem to have seen their hometown as a festive place. Living residents settled in the driest spots, while burial mounds rose up in wetter places. ![]() "It's a city built to straddle water and dry land," Pauketat said. Sprawling across a landscape that combines solid earth with patches of swamp, Cahokia may have served as a kind of spiritual crossroads. For many cultures with roots in ancient Cahokia, "water is this barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead," Pauketat said. They didn't find it in Cahokia, which Pauketat believes may instead have been conceived as a place to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead. It's led to generations of looking for that kind of thing everywhere," Pauketat said. "People thought that this must be the basis for all early cities. When excavating cities in Mesopotamia, researchers found evidence that trade was the organising principle behind their development, then turned the same lens on ancient cities across the globe. "It's definitely a bias that influenced earlier archaeologists," he said. Assumptions that commerce is the key to urban life long shaped a Western view of the past, explains archaeologist Timothy Pauketat, who has studied Cahokia for decades. I keep wondering 'Where were they trading? Who was making money?'," Newitz said. "Cahokia was really a cultural centre rather than a trade centre. The massive city lacked a permanent marketplace, confounding old assumptions that trade is the organising principle behind all urbanisation. It's what Cahokia didn't have that's startling, writes Annalee Newitz in their recent book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
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