This dramatic and controversial new interpretation of Cahokian leadership strategies examines the authority a ruling elite exercised over the surrounding countryside through a complex of social, political, and religious forms. Using the theoretical concepts of agency, power, and ideology, this study explores the development of cultural complexity within the hierarchically organized Cahokia Middle Mississippian society of the American Bottom from the...

An anthropologist examines a Native American city that flourished along the Mississippi River near present-day St. Louis almost a thousand years ago, describing evidence of a once-powerful society that had been abandoned by 1400.