Cahokia
Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi

I was hoping to read more about Cahokia itself as it was, but it felt like more than half of the book was actually dedicated to the story of the archaeologists who uncovered various parts of it. It's nice to know about, I guess, but as a non-archaeologist I had a hard time visualizing the descriptio......more

This book tells the wrong story, devoting most of its short length to the excavation of Cahokia by generations of researchers, and offering the reader little information about the site itself. It's a very odd decision. I don't know if Pauketat, himself an academic and excavator, believed that these......more

"The findings at Cahokia call into question some long-held beliefs -- for instance, that ecologically sensitive, peaceful, mystical and egalitarian peoples freely roamed the North American continent, never overpopulating or overexploiting their environments . . . and that they could not have built c......more

I will always remember my Time-Life Mysteries of the Ancient World book, which featured a misty picture of the Cahokia mounds and informed us that no one knows who built these mysterious mounds, or why, (oooOOOoooOOOOooo) before moving on to Easter Island. Either the Time-Life people were slacking o......more

So, right, a book about Native American History in the US. I'm somewhat better on pre-Columbian Latin American history, but after reading this I have determined it's possible that I don't know anything because no one knows that much, not just because I'm an ignoramus. Anyway, this is not quite as eng......more