Climate Change and Environment in Cahokia’s History

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists, particularly in the southeast, have often looked to the environment and climate change to understand the evolution of past societies. Droughts, floods, and environmental degradation have been implicated in the rise and fall of societies, especially Mississippian period societies like the city of Cahokia. Despite calls to provide more holistic interpretations of places like Cahokia, agency, history, and practice are frequently relegated to the background and environmental processes are elevated as primary causal factors precipitating culture change. In this presentation, we consider environment and climate change at Cahokia from a relational perspective, drawing from Indigenous philosophies of locality, place-thought, kinship, and reciprocity, to provide an avenue for more nuanced understanding of how people negotiated their relationships with the inhabited world - including how climate change might have been interpreted as embedded within and stemming from those relationships. Climate, while important, cannot necessarily be considered a primary driver, as environments and their inhabitants were among many significant relationships that factor into the choices and histories of past (and present) people.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38393.0