Cahokian Indians: America’s Ancient Warriors

Given what is known about later Southeastern chiefdoms, Cahokian warriors most likely were organized into units, each with as many as several hundred combatants and broken down into subunits of various sizes commanded by war captains. Their assaults against enemy villages, even the capitals of outlying competing chiefdoms, almost certainly were not aimed at anyone but chiefs and a few warriors and captives. Presumably, annihilating entire villages not only would have violated the military standards of the eleventh and twelfth centuries but also would have negated the possible economic benefits of warring: the acquisition of food stores and valuables, and the establishment of tributary relations that funneled such things toward Cahokia.

Rival leaders were undoubtedly killed if necessary, members of opposing factions may have been executed, and long-distance raids were undertaken to eliminate rivals. Yet the frequency with which Cahokian arrows, warclubs, and flint knives were brought to bear against human flesh and bone is difficult to measure archaeologically, given the dearth of formal cemeteries. Unfortunately for archaeologists, most of the region’s dead were not buried in the flesh, but were laid out on scaffolds or in charnel houses, the bits of bone later removed for burial or dispersal at special burial sites at Cahokia or at remote locations.

Nineteenth-century diggings, often by amateurs, and twentieth-century archaeological excavations have, however, uncovered pits containing the remains of the society’s high-status men and women. These excavations reveal much about the cause and context of death. The late-eleventh-century pits indicate that there were mass sacrifices of women, retainer executions, and beheadings and delimbings associated with plaza rituals. In one case, thirty-nine men and women (a ratio of three-to-one), from ages fifteen to forty-five, had been killed–three beheaded and at least two shot in the back with arrows. Their bodies filled a trench that was then partially covered with earth and capped with a second layer of dead, presumably killed at the same time and carefully arranged side by side on cedar litters. In another case, the severed legs and arms of at least three people were buried in a small pit beside the central post of a neighborhood plaza at Cahokia.

Cahokians may have used such killings to help control a region of up to several hundred square miles. War parties extended the Cahokian threat even farther afield, neutralizing enemies along the central portion of the Mississippi River. The absence of moderate- to large-sized chiefdoms within two hundred river miles of Cahokia is evidence of the success of this policy. Cahokian dominance of the middle Mississippi lasted until the thirteenth century. Its disappearance is explained in part by a military crisis that emerged in the twelfth century.

Evidence that Cahokia experienced a military crisis around 1200 includes the construction of a log palisade that enclosed the central mound-and-plaza precinct of the Cahokian capital. It was a massive structure, some two to three miles in length, built and rebuilt four times over a span of roughly fifty years. Each construction entailed the cutting, delimbing, debarking, hauling, and placement of twenty thousand logs. The walls featured L-shaped shielded entryways, catwalks, and bastions, the latter built from posts slightly larger and taller than those of the palisade itself. Spaced along the wall approximately every twenty yards, a total of about 150 to two hundred bastions lined the fortification. The spacing between these works allowed an enfilade of arrows to be shot down onto would-be attackers all along the palisade. Moreover, the bastions permitted the entire central precinct of the capital to be guarded from potential raiders by as few as three or four hundred sentries.

The decision to build the first palisade had serious implications, as it forced the reorganization of the capital grounds. A wall sacrificed the vistas, open spaces, and avenues that had previously connected mounds with plazas and residential wards. It cut neighborhoods in half, and this would not have been done without good cause. The construction of the palisade signals a major reorientation of military strategy from an entirely offensive focus to a combined offensive and defensive stance.