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Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City On The Mississippi (2009)

by Timothy R. Pauketat(Favorite Author)

3.47 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0670020907 (ISBN13: 9780670020904)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Viking Adult

review 1: This book desperately needed pictures, diagrams, or some sort of visual element. I could have also done without the endless pages of mind-numbing details about (for example) what certain artifacts looked like. Just give us an image and move on, don't spend three pages describing its every curve and marking. Aside from the unnecessary details, the idea behind the book is fascinating. I loved learning about what the Cahokian society may have been like at its prime.
review 2: 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... more these details are more interesting than they actually are, or if he was searching for a way to "tell a story" with it, to make it more appealing for a general audience. There are many cases in which excavation work is fascinating, but this is not one of them. Cahokia has been picked over for more than a century, primarily by obscure academics, graduate students and public works employees, often racing ahead of the highway construction that criss-crossed the enormous site. There's a certain drama in frantically digging late into the night to beat the road crews, but it's not exactly the stuff of Heinrich Schliemann. The truth is, we know very little about Cahokia, and who lived there, and what they did, and why they abandoned the site, and where they went. The paucity of information we possess is rendered still more obscure by Pauketat's vague references to "complex debates" about such matters in the literature. I would have loved for him to dwell a bit more on some of them. The fact is, I could care less about the head of the archaeology department at UI, Champaign-Urbana in 1955 or whatever. What I'm interested in is Cahokia. Yeah, not too illuminating. less

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