From The Cahokian WINTER 1997-98
by Timothy R. Pauketat, Ph.D.
State University of New York at Buffalo

In times past, plazas were the central features of social and religious life at Cahokia and places like it to the south and east in North America. Plazas were open spaces where ritual gatherings were open spaces where ritual gatherings were held, where chunkey games were played, throngs of people converged. It is a good bet that the size of any plaza at Cahokia is a proxy indication of the numbers of people who participated in the building and use of that space. For this reason, Cahokia's central plaza—covering about 50 acres—is telling of a giant labor force and enormous social gatherings unmatched elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley. This central open ground is truly a "Grand Plaza," as Dr. Melvin Fowler has dubbed it (1997), larger than those of other Mississippian capitals and even larger than capital plazas of some early Mesoamerican civilizations.

Several years back, researchers from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville observed, using electromagnetic instruments and small test excavations, that this monumental plaza was not natural (Dalan 1997). Rather, the Grand Plaza had been leveled through a cut-and-fill method around the beginning of the Mississippian period (now dated to about A.D. 1050). In 1994, with a crew from the University of Oklahoma, I found evidence beneath Mound 49 that corroborated their results: the earliest mound stages were built at the same time as the plaza was leveled. The construction of Monks Mound probably began at the same time.

The leveling of the plaza and the building of the early mounds were monumental work projects potentially as labor intensive as any construction effort ever at the site. It is all the more important for our understanding of Cahokia, then, that this monumental project(s) dates to the very beginning of Cahokia's reign over the surrounding region. How, archaeologists ask, were people governed and their labor coordinated to build a plaza and mounds at Cahokia on a scale never seen in pre-Columbian North America before A.D. 1050 or after the demise of Cahokia (now dated to abut A.D. 1350)? My own answer, based on past studies, is that Cahokia experienced the equivalent of the "Big Bang" (Pauketat 1997). This was a brief moment in history, at about A.D. 1050, when Cahokia went from a modest pre-Mississippian town (with few to no mounds) to an enormous center of 10,000 people (Pauketat and Lopinot 1997).

Piecing together the puzzle of why Cahokia's Big Bang occurred receive a recent boost thanks to a modern waterline. In 1997, the "Central Mississippi Valley Archaeological Research Institute" provided the archaeological expertise and labor to excavate ahead of a waterline that was to pass through the Grand Plaza from north to south and east to west. With the help of a field school from the University of Buffalo, we scraped the old plow zone off a yard-wide trench about 1200 meters (or 3950 feet) in length (see Figure 1).*

Our trench ran the width of the plaza, from east to west, and beyond into the old Falcon Drive-In theater west of Mound 48. A second north-south trench met this east-west segment near the southeast corner of Monks Mound and extended due south before jogging west to end near Mound 60 (Fox Mound).