University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor Timothy Pauketat will give a lecture at the University of Colorado at Boulder Saturday, Jan. 28, on an explosion of cultural complexity 1,000 years ago from a city known as Cahokia near present-day St. Louis.
An internationally known researcher and scholar, Pauketat will talk about the rise and fall of Cahokia, once home to an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people, and its cultural influence on ancient peoples across the Midwest and southeastern United States. The CU-Boulder anthropology department's 11th annual Distinguished Archaeology Lecture is free and open to the public.
The talk will be held at 7 p.m. in room 270 of the Hale Science Building and will include a question-and-answer session with the audience. A public reception with Pauketat will follow. Hale Science is located just east of Broadway and Pleasant streets and parking is available along University Avenue.
Cahokia was the hub of the so-called "Mississippian" culture that spread along the Mississippi River from the Midwest to the Southeast and was the largest and most complex society north of Mexico in prehistoric times. Distinctive groups, migrations and political rituals in the region appear to have combined with particular events over time to trigger a "Big Bang," or a rapid and fundamental set of changes, in North American culture, according to Pauketat.
The massive cultural shift associated with Cahokia ultimately affected the European colonization of the continent, according to research by Pauketat and others.
The ancient city of Cahokia, located where St. Louis and East St. Louis are today, contained more than 100 earthen mounds and was dominated by Monks Mound, which rose 100 feet from its 14-acre base and is estimated to have required 22 million cubic feet of Earth transported from nearby pits. The city probably spanned about five square miles in its heyday before the majority of people dispersed by about 1300.
Pauketat 's research since the 1990s has centered on the technologies, practices, migrations and patterns of the Mississippian culture - once known as the "mound builders" -- as well as indigenous people in the Great Plains and South. Pauketat has conducted large-scale village excavations and extensive collections research, with emphasis on the ancient city of Cahokia.
He has just completed two books, "Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions" for AltaMira Press of Walnut Creek, Calif., and "Cahokia and the Big Bang of Ancient North America" for Viking Penguin Press of New York. In 2001 he edited "The Archaeology of Traditions: Agency and History Before and After Columbus, published by the University Press of Florida, Gainsville.
Pauketat received his bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan.
The Jan. 28 event is sponsored by Western Cultural Resource Management of Boulder.