Chronometric Evidence Does Not Support Cahokia’s “Big Bang”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cahokia was the largest pre-contact Indigenous population center north of Mexico, and its development and dissolution are tied in myriad ways to numerous communities across the American Southeast and Midwest. Most current scholarship emphasizes a “Big Bang” which models the emergence of Cahokia as a profound and rapid event at ca. AD 1050 characterized by dramatic demographic expansion, migration, unprecedented monumental construction, and residential reorganization that speaks to the emergence of new social arrangements and a centralization of political authority. This model, however, is underpinned by materially based chronologies. In this paper, I synthesize the existing regional radiocarbon data, individually assess the reliability of dates, and provide revised ceramic chronologies within a contemporary Bayesian framework. I leverage this to produce new demographic estimates and present these data alongside models of monumental construction in order to evaluate the pace of demographic expansion and the timing of social change as materialized in construction events. Results suggest that the demographic expansion of Cahokia was more gradual and later in time than current models propose, and the political history of Cahokia materialized in monumental construction is far more dynamic.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53645