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Home > History and Archaeology > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > Cahokia: A World Renewal Cult Heterarchy
Cahokia: A World Renewal Cult Heterarchy

Cahokia: A World Renewal Cult Heterarchy


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About the Book

"[Byers] confronts conventional interpretations of the hierarchical socio-political organization of prehistoric Cahokia, arguing that its rise in the twelfth century resulted from its importance as a heterarchical multi-cult center. Both provoking and stimulating, Cahokia's arguments challenge current assumptions in archaeological reconstructions of prehistoric political complexity."--Thomas E. Emerson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cahokia is located in the northern expanse of American Bottom, the largest of the Mississippian flood plains, and opposite St. Louis, Missouri. Byers overturns the current political characterization of this largest known North American prehistoric site north of Mexico. Rather than treating Cahokia as the seat of a dominant Native American polity, a "paramount chiefdom," Byers argues that it must be given a religious characterization as a world renewal cult center. Furthermore, the social and economic powers that it manifests must not be seen to reside in Cahokia itself but in multiple world renewal cults distributed across the American Bottom and in the nearby upland regions.

Byers argues that Cahokia can be thought of as an affiliation of mutually autonomous cults that pooled their labor and other resources and established their collective mission as the performance of world renewal rituals by which to maintain and enhance the sacred powers of the cosmos. The cults, he argues, adopted two forms of sacrifice: one was the incrementally staged manipulation of the deceased (burial, disinterment, bone cleaning, and reburial), with each unfolding step constituting a mortuary act having different and greater world renewal sacrificial force. The other was lethal human sacrifice--probably correlated with long distance warfare by which to procure victims.

A. Martin Byers is a research affiliate in anthropology at McGill University in Montreal.



About the Author :
A. Martin Byers is a research affiliate in anthropology at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of The Ohio Hopewell Episode: Paradigm Lost, Paradigm Gained, and a contributor to several edited volumes, including Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium (UPF).

Review :
"Cahokia, with over 100 mounds, has generally been viewed as the most complex Mississippian chiefdom, perhaps approaching the level of a state. In this view, the huge mounds at Cahokia are seen as statements about power and politics. Byers argues against this view, arguing instead that the constructions at Cahokia are fundamentally about rituals structured by nonkin 'cult' institutions." - Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society "Byers says Cahokia is not a place where chiefs at the apex of a political or religious hierarchy constructed monuments to their power. Instead, he argues, Cahokia is a place where multiple separate 'cults' constructed facilities for rituals that were intended to ameliorate the increasing 'pollution' of the world caused by the increasing human use and modification of the landscape.... The virtue of Byers's book is that it challenges some of the taken-for-granteds that figure in other accounts of Cahokian society. This is a careful and extended piece of scholarship from an original thinker." - Cambridge Archaeological Journal "A brilliantly original, innovative interpretation of the site and Amerindian late prehistory, and should be examined by every professional archaeologist and historian. Summing Up: Essential." - Choice"


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780813033860
  • Publisher: University Press of Florida
  • Publisher Imprint: University Press of Florida
  • Height: 231 mm
  • Returnable: Y
  • Sub Title: A World Renewal Cult Heterarchy
  • Width: 154 mm
  • ISBN-10: 0813033861
  • Publisher Date: 01 Apr 2009
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Spine Width: 33 mm
  • Weight: 888 gr


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