Cahokia After Dark: Affect, Water, and the Moon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cahokia may not be the first place to come to mind when thinking about urbanism, but given new thinking and discoveries from a series of major excavations at and around this novel kind of city, views about the causes and consequences of American Indian urbanism are substantially changing. In part this is because we realize that urbanism is an experience found in the assemblage and rhizomatic connections of sensations, atmospheres, and affects of a time and place. This is just as true for Cahokia as for any urbanism. Urbanism at Cahokia was however, as much about experiences of the night as it was about the daytime. Interpreting Cahokia’s archaeological data through a lens of ethnohistorical data, as evidenced by use and proximity to caves, caverns, and underground water, it becomes very clear that Cahokians actively sought, if not also recreated, experiences of the night. Very often, those experiences were tied to water and the moon. As I will argue, an understanding of the full assemblage of what made Cahokia urban requires a consideration of the full experience of the landscapes of the night.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24459