Walking into the midst of the ancient American Indian city of Cahokia in 1810, young frontier lawyer Henry Brackenridge was stunned: “I was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids.” Doing the same in the 21st century is somewhat less astounding, the experience marred by modern housing, industrial alterations, a 21st century landfill, and strip development. Much has changed, but pieces of the sprawling native proto-urban complex, dating from the 11th to the 14th centuries CE, remain in our midst. We must ask questions if we are to understand its lessons.
Cahokia's control of the manufacture and distribution of these hand tools was an important economic activity that allowed the city to thrive. Mississippian culture pottery and stone tools in the Cahokian style were found at the Silvernale site 21 near Red Wing, Minnesota, and materials and trade goods from Pennsylvania, the Gulf Coast. Kaskaskia-Cahokia Trail. 2,610 likes 1,597 talking about this. Known to early settlers as 'the Kaskaskia Trace,' the Kaskaskia-Cahokia Trail is once again becoming a travel destination. 1,668 Night Shift jobs available in Cahokia, IL on Indeed.com. Apply to Overnight Closer, Order Picker, Stocker and more! Night Clubs in Cahokia on YP.com. See reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers and more for the best Night Clubs in Cahokia, IL.
Welcome to the Greater Cahokia website. We are engaged in a collaborative set of inquiries to understand the historical effects of this singular ancient phenomenon and its relevance for our 21st century world. Our research seeks to understand how the Cahokia that we can still see today came to be, some nine centuries ago, and how it changed the known human and nonhuman world of the Mississippi valley centuries ago. Four projects make up our collaborative effort: the Emerald Acropolis Project, the Richland Analysis Project, the Mississippian Initiative, and the Yankeetown Project. All are pieces of a larger puzzle of the rise and fall of greater Cahokia, its ancestral settlements, religious shrines, related support colonies, and later towns of descendants, often called the “Mississippians” by archaeologists, that dot the lower Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.
In the 1990s, Principal Investigators Timothy Pauketat and Susan Alt began work in the Richland Complex, a Cahokia-related farming district in the upland hills east of Cahokia proper. Then, as now, the remains of the living and farming sites of people long past were under serious threat of destruction. Many were lost; more continue to be destroyed. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, our crews of students and volunteers excavated large portions of Cahokia-related farming settlements, a ritual-administrative complex, and a shrine complex. More recently, Alt has sought to understand the foundational roles of the so-called Yankeetown people of southern Indiana while Pauketat turned to western Wisconsin, where Cahokians are now thought to have established a colony around one or more northern shrine complexes.
Most recently, both Alt and Pauketat have teamed up for two new projects. The first involves bringing the insights of Cahokia’s rich farmlands to light, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Co-PIs Thomas Emerson and Laura Kozuch of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, join them in this collaborative effort to understand how new agrarian relationships linked farmlands and farmers with other forces of the world in ways that underwrote Cahokia’s urbanism. The second involves Pauketat and Alt’s joint effort to rethink the relationships between religion and urbanism via major new excavations at the Emerald Acropolis, with the support of the John Templeton Foundation. We hope that these projects will enable all of us to consider or reconsider the causes and consequences of Cahokia as a place and as a historical phenomenon that profounded affected the histories of many native descendant communities in the Midwest, Southeast, and Great Plains today.
The possible reasons for the emergence of Cahokia, or any early city, have intrigued scholars for more than a century. Archaeologists in North America, unfortunately, often narrowly appraise the causes, looking just to climate change or societal problems in need of a solution, without thinking about the aspirations, designs, and ingenuity of people. They also often forget to put a single place, such as the city of Cahokia, into its wider context. No cities ever developed in a vacuum. Rather, they arise in conjunction with hinterlands, immigrant communities, and mysterious far-off realms the powers of which help in some ways to define the centers, to give them power. We want to understand those relationships, and so we consider contemporary native perspectives and explanations, alongside newer theories of religion and urbanism. We seek to understand how people, places, things, and phenomena seen and unseen on the land and in the sky combined to build Cahokia and make North American history. It matters, for instance, that religion for Cahokians was probably not a conservative set of restrictive institutions but an enabling way of relating to the world around them. At Cahokia and elsewhere around the world, religious sensibilities, second-nature understandings of otherworldly powers, routinely underwrite social life such that both ordinary and extraordinary people, places, and things all mediated the fundamental relationships between life and death, day and night, past and future, and heaven and earth. Human and non-human beings and forces are all entangled in the causes and effects of history.
In the relational terms above, early urbanism could not happen simply as a consequence of political or economic stimuli. Otherworldly powers that tapped people’s fundamental (ontological) predispositions, when entangled by phenomena or through experiences at places, caused cities to arise. So it was, for instance, with Rome and Mexico City, which were founded through augury, or Baghdad, established through consultations with the stars, or Amarna, home to the sun and the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten in New Kingdom Egypt. Cahokia too was a cosmic city, a place where the moon, sun, and Milky Way touched the earth and its people. Special “shrine complexes” surrounded the city, as close as the Emerald Acropolis 24 km to the east and as far as Trempealeau, 900 river kilometers to the north in western Wisconsin. People drawn to these Cahokian places from far and wide, including the Yankeetown farmers of the Wabash and Ohio valleys to the east. Many stayed. Nine hundred years ago, people would visit them and then return home with new understandings of themselves and the great beyond.
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Next steps for the Cahokia Heights consolidation plan include preparing for a new city government and making additional plans to inform residents about details of the merger, according to local leaders.
On Tuesday night, voters in Cahokia, Centreville and Alorton approved a referendum to merge the three cities into a single town called Cahokia Heights. About 61% voted in favor of the merger, and nearly 37% voted against it, according to unofficial election results.
“The residents voted for a change and a new day and hopefully something that would bring some life back into these communities,” Cahokia Mayor Curtis McCall Jr., said.
Focus on April’s election
The three cities will merge after the April election, when voters get to decide on new officials that will form the government of Cahokia Heights. The referendum approved Tuesday calls for an aldermanic form of government, with board members elected at large.
McCall said he plans to have multiple informational meetings for residents ahead of the election as he prepares to wind down the current Cahokia town government.
Although he doesn’t know when those meetings will take place as of now, he said they will likely be virtual because of the pandemic.
Cahokia Dating Night Quotes
“The biggest thing is to make sure residents know that they’re going to have to vote again in April so that they can make an informed decision on who they’ll be voting for,” McCall said. “I think right now it’s time to just have meetings with the residents about how this is going to shape up.”
“I know some information was provided during those town hall meetings that we had a couple of months ago. I’m sure that we’re going to lay everything out from everything for the people who didn’t attend those meetings. We’ll talk about everything from the financial details to what it looks like to form a new city.”
The referendum voters approved Tuesday is the second part of the “Better Together” campaign, a four-phase plan. The first was in March, when voters in Centreville and Alorton overwhelmingly approved a referendum to merge their two towns.
Local leaders believe creating one large community by combining the three towns will help attract more federal funding for fixing failed infrastructure and making other improvements. Within the past 10 years, Cahokia has lost about 9% of its residents, which is the steepest population decline among cities in St. Clair County.
Public meetings for the Cahokia Heights consolidation were held in August and September so that residents could learn more about the proposal and voice any concerns to government officials. Similar meetings were held earlier this year for the merger of Centreville and Alorton.
But residents have yet to receive a detailed financial plan of the consolidation, which has created doubts among some voters about the viability of the plan.
McCall said he encourages residents who had those concerns to reach out to him and other leaders involved in the plan.
“For anyone who feels that they don’t have the appropriate information regarding this merger, I would encourage them to please contact myself or anyone else so we can explain in detail what’s going on.”
“I believe that we provided adequate information from my stance, but people’s interpretation of that information may be different, which is why I encourage people to reach out to us.”
A consultant did tell voters before the election that residents would save about $430 in their annual property taxes each year when Centreville Township is eliminated as part of the longer term plan. However, that was the only financial detail residents received about how the merger would affect them.
McCall doesn’t know when the detailed financial assessment - which officials said voters would see before the merger vote - will be available to the public, but he said he plans on having that information included in upcoming meetings with residents.
‘I believe this is going to be a template.’
Once the merger of the three towns is complete, the third and fourth phases of the plan include future referenda and legislation on proposals to dissolve Centreville Township and add Commonfields of Cahokia to Cahokia Heights.
Centreville Township Supervisor Curtis McCall Sr., Mayor McCall’s father, said he plans to use the elimination of Belleville Township as an example for dissolving Centreville’s.
In 2017, Belleville took over the duties of Belleville Township, founded in 1885, through state and local legislation.
“This is the time now to bring everyone together and set aside their differences and work together,” McCall Sr., said. “I will be a part of the team that will reach out through social media, through phones, my network, through people that I know who didn’t support the merger to get involved in this new city to throw their names in the hat to run for the elected offices.”
“All of these political positions will be open in the new city, and I think we have to reach across the aisle and get a very diverse group of individuals to become a part of it.”
Centreville Mayor Marius “Mark” Jackson said he’s “extremely happy” about the merger being approved and is working on the appropriate steps it would take to form Cahokia Heights.
“Right now I’m pretty much just focusing on the shape of the new city,” Jackson said. “Getting rid of a lot of overhead, you know the duplication of services, having one public works department, pretty much where we want to put what buildings where, just pretty much laying the groundwork for the new city. It’s a lot of work to be done, but that’s where the cost savings come because we’ll stop duplicating services.”
“Everything’s going to be centrally located, so there’s a lot of discussions to be had, but residents will be informed every step of the way.”
Alorton Mayor JoAnn Reed said she’s working on plans to inform her constituents about how the merger will affect them. She said she’s hoping to have timeline for those plans the week of Nov. 8.
“We actually didn’t have a date set for that because we needed to get past the election,” Reed said Thursday. “I’m certain that by next week, we’ll be putting a plan together and a timetable and I have to try to do that with every city. It’s going to be a little easier for Cahokia because they just have to add “Heights” [to the end of its name].
“We have to change. Our zip codes will probably not change, but we have post offices and things like that that have to change. And we have businesses that rely on location and they’ll have to change, so it’s everything.”
“You have to change all of that, eventually. I don’t see it happening overnight, so there has to be a plan to continue to speak with people and help them lead and answer their questions and relieve their fears. I look forward to that.”
McCall Sr. said he hopes the consolidation plan can eventually become an example for other communities in the state that are suffering financially and losing population.
Cahokia Dating Night Girls
“I believe that this is going to be a template for economically depressed communities all across the state of Illinois to consolidate their resources, to eliminate the overhead costs of running municipal buildings and paying for different police departments for cities that are contiguous with each other.”
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The communities of Cahokia, Centreville and Alorton are working on plans to form a new city called Cahokia Heights. If you have questions, tips, story ideas or comments about the process, please reach out to DeAsia Paige at dsutgrey@bnd.com or call 239-2500.
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