Cahokian Indians: America’s Ancient Warriors

On this odd footing of political violence, historical circumstance, and community ritual was built North America’s so-called Mississippian civilization. There were other capitals in the Midwest and Southeast, far removed in time and space from Cahokia but called Mississippian after the river along which they clustered. These later chiefdoms rose and fell in the lower Mississippi River valley and across the wooded hills and plains of the Southeast during the five centuries that followed the Cahokian summer. Each chiefdom was organized by warrior-chiefs who administered the produce, labor, and rites of an agricultural people. Political fortunes, local economies, and the very fabric of social life hinged as much on the outcomes of their endeavors, violent and otherwise, as they did on the production of agricultural crops.

The Cahokian site, however, was the largest and earliest–five times the size of the next largest Mississippian capital, Moundville in present-day Alabama, and more than ten times the size of ordinary chiefly communities. Yet there is little direct evidence of warfare of the sort practiced by later tribes, as recorded by Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Few Cahokian skeletons reveal obvious war wounds, and no dead bodies have been found sprawled out in the ashes of incinerated buildings, as are found in remains of some early societies around the world. How, then, could Cahokians, in an archaeological eyeblink, consolidate thousands of formerly scattered people and mobilize them to construct a planned capital of unheard of proportions? Why did people living a low-risk, sedentary, semiautonomous life in villages abandon their settlements, along with traditional forms of housing and village organization, to live under a radically different set of circumstances at Cahokia?

The answer, now becoming apparent through archaeology, is that Cahokia’s inclusive politics (and the threat of warfare) was sufficient to build a civilization. Cahokia, it seems, was founded not as an aristocratic regime but as a large-scale coalition of high- and low-ranking interests led by warrior chiefs. All could benefit from a Cahokian order–and many did, as evidenced by Cahokia’s redistribution and reward of valuables to its people. So many benefited, in fact, that no perimeter fortifications were needed around the capital for more than a century following the Cahokian summer. Even the burials of the early overlords display a curious communal quality; being chief meant being part of the larger community. Chiefly symbolism was a group phenomenon; the symbolic objects themselves–ax heads, beads, pots, medicines, and more–were manufactured by common Cahokians and distributed throughout the region from the capital.

This symbolism, however, also reveals Cahokia’s dark side, for it included a suite of novel tools, weapons, and birds-of-prey imagery suggestive of group violence. New, standardized styles of ax heads, knives, and arrowheads were manufactured in prodigious numbers by local artisans as part of the social and symbolic changes that followed hard on the heels of the Cahokian summer.

Arrowheads in particular stand out as radically altered in style and quantity. Two distinct and uniform styles–a barbed, harpoon-like bone tip and an elongated, finely chipped, and often serrated stone triangle–have been found in great numbers at Cahokia. It is unlikely that either type of arrowhead was made to represent or be used in hunting game. Many depictions of raptor feathers appear on various Cahokian objects, as does arrow fletching. These were the icons and arrows of war, symbolizing the prowess of Cahokians and perhaps the threat of Cahokian retribution. Hundreds of exaggerated versions of these arrowheads were interred with the carefully laid-out bodies of the new regional overlords and their attendants in what archaeologists call Mound 72, a high-status burial mound at Cahokia.

Based on these artifacts and on what is known about the pre-Mississippian tribal peoples, it may be surmised that Cahokian warfare was, in some ways, an extension of the tribal feud on a grander scale. Small-scale raids and ambushes, usually limited to isolated revenge killings, characterized the less-organized pre-Mississippian peoples and those in the prairie lands to the north and west, who fringed the early Mississippian world even after Cahokia emerged as a regional capital. But Cahokia elevated the feud to a new political level; it became a high-stakes affair with dramatic consequences. In part, the new feuding was a function of Cahokia’s population density–ten thousand people in one place can scarcely be expected to live according to the old tribal rules. Cahokia’s brand of warfare was thus a product of the expanding population of this first Mississippian chiefdom.

The war parties of Cahokia’s first few decades were likely drawn from all able-bodied persons. If the burials in Mound 72 include the remains of actual combatants, then women as well as men may have taken part in warfare. Assuming that all able-bodied adults (i.e., more than twenty and less than fifty percent of the capital’s residents) were potential combatants, then the Cahokian chief could have fielded between two thousand and five thousand warriors. This was irrespective of the hundreds more who could have been mobilized from outlying subordinate settlements.

Given the potential size of the Cahokian fighting force–larger than anything a prospective enemy could field (and even larger than any force that European explorers would encounter centuries later)–Cahokia likely precipitated the adoption of increasingly standardized military tactics, weapons, and organizations for assaulting its neighbors. Projectiles, shock weapons, and shields were employed in such forays. The bows, arrows, knives, and clubs used in Cahokian warfare were larger and more elaborate versions of ordinary utilitarian hunting, cutting, and chopping tools. Fired from bows measuring up to six feet, war arrows had an accurate range of as much as two hundred yards. These projectiles’ stone and bone points were serrated to maximize internal damage and to inhibit easy removal. Shock weapons included an array of knives and clubs specially made from stone and wood and highly prized by their owners. Shields, presumably made of wood, were used in hand-to-hand combat and to deflect enemy arrows.