Fascinating review by Andrew O’Hehir in today’s Salon of Timothy Pauketat’s, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi.  In it, Pauketat shines a light on a chapter in American history that’s long gone ignored—evaded, even.  Situated east of modern-day St. Louis and larger than London, Cahokia was once a thriving Native American metropolis, complete with plazas and pyramids, before finally succumbing to disease, dissent and destruction.  Well, there was something else:

...it also seems clear that political and religious power in Cahokia revolved around another ancient tradition.  Cahokians performed human sacrifice, as part of some kind of theatrical, community-wide ceremony, on a startlingly large scale unknown in North America above the valley of Mexico.  Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia’s mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it.  A few of them weren’t dead yet when they went into the pit—skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them.

As unsavory as that sounds to today’s ears, Pauketat goes on to draw parallels between those sacrifices, and the near-complete erasure undertaken by contemporary scholars who would have most likely dismissed the notion of a Native American city as:

bizarre and self-contradictory.  Scholarly conceptions weren’t all that far away from pop culture depictions: American Indians lived light on the land, mostly in hunter-gatherer societies augmented by minimal subsistence agriculture.  While they may have had “ceremonial centers” along with seasonal villages and hunting and fishing camps, they didn’t live in large or permanent settlements.

Pauketa’s book might serve as a corrective to the old myopic views on Native American possibility, but this ritual sacrifice business seems harder to shake.  Was it just another bread-and-circus solution to curb growing unrest?  Maybe so.  As O’Hehir concludes, “Cahokia forged a new sense of community out of these rituals, one that merged church and state, and Cahokians ‘tolerated the excesses of their leaders,’ as most of us do, as long as the party kept going.”
 
In Salon: Sacrificial Virgins of the Mississippi