Description
By George R. Milner
“A substantial and beautifully produced synthesis of a single archaeological region [and prehistoric political system].”
—Cambridge Archaeological Journal
“Readers will welcome this wide-ranging and closely reasoned introduction to the archaeology of the earliest and largest Mississippian paramountcy…this essential work…is a tonic against earlier hasty overestimations of Cahokia’s size and complexity.”
—American Antiquity
Now available for the first time in a paperback edition, The Cahokia Chiefdom surveys one of North America’s great archaeological sites that include more than one hundred earthen mounds constructed between the 11th and 14th century. Milner paints a vivd picture of the site and its environs while arguing that the regional system was not as powerful and all-encompassing as commonly thought, but was instead a collection of semi-autonomous districts with far fewer people that previously. The author attributes the region’s growth to a complex interplay of cultural, demographic, and environmental factors, including the social relations across the region that involved the emergence of competing centers. This edition features a new introduction by the author updating the archaeological evidence through 2005.
George R. Milner is professor of archaeological anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University, and the author of The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America.
University Press of Florida, 2006
ISBN: 0-8130-2981-3
