Cahokia was a major Precolombian city in modern-day Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri. It was the first major city in North America north of Mexico and stood for four centuries beginning in 950 CE – at its highest point, it reached a population of twenty to thirty thousand people in the year 1200 (Yates 2016). Despite being abandoned in the late twelfth century, Cahokia’s principal monuments–its mounds–still stand tall. The mounds were important to Cahokian religious and ritual life, and when their contents were unearthed, archaeologists found overwhelming evidence of human sacrifice. 

In Mound 72, archaeologists unearthed a mass grave of two hundred and seventy-two teenage girls and young women. The bodies of the women, for the most part, showed no signs of blunt-force trauma (Pauketat 2010). They were also not buried all at once–Pauketat estimates that based on how they were buried, at least one group of girls was sacrificed every generation, meaning there must have been something in their tradition that required a large number of young women to be sacrificed periodically. The age and state of the women suggest that their sacrifice was a ritual surrounding fertility (Isselhardt 2022).

Pauketat suggests in his book Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on The Mississippi, that the sheer number of girls sacrificed in this ritual may have caused political unrest and points towards the excavation of the upland Halliday site with more feminine-oriented artifacts as a possible source for the young women used for these grand sacrifices. The hypothesis of this theory makes sense in the context of the book–a study on the teeth of the sacrificed women compared to the teeth of the human remains found in the Halliday site suggests that the Halliday citizens, much like some women who were sacrificed, had a diet high in maize and low in protein, meaning they were less healthy than inner-city Cahokians. (Pauketat 2010)

However, the idea that the sacrificed women were immigrants or non-locals has come into question. Using dental morphology, strontium isotope analyses, and dental metrics, a team of scientists was able to determine that the young women in the mass graves had a high degree of relatedness, for the most part, and came from the centralized Cahokia area. Strontium isotopes on the teeth confirmed that the crops they were eating were grown in the same regions as the crops eaten by the greater population of the city (Thompson 2015). This does not mean that Pauketat was entirely wrong, however. The group of women buried in one mound together called F229-lower had a slightly different morphology than the other women, especially in F229-higher, who showed a higher degree of relatedness with each other (Thompson 2015). 

The investigation has raised more questions than provided answers. These would have been the daughters of the city and they would be at a large loss sacrificing so many young women. Only future research can tell us what we need to know about the sacrifice of the women at Mound 72.

Additional Information:

Strontium-isotope analysis: https://cais.uga.edu/service/strontium-isotope-analysis/#:~:text=Strontium%20isotopic%20ratios%20are%20widely,the%20decay%20of%2087Rb. 

Dental Morphology:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128019665000068

Works Cited:

Isselhardt, Tiffany. “Girlhood and the Downfall of Cahokia.” Medium, February 27, 2022. https://historymuse.medium.com/girlhood-and-the-downfall-of-cahokia-4cc76290830f. 

Pauketat, Timothy R. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2010. 

Pauketat, Timothy  R. “Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making.” Research Gate, September 2005. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226748570_Agency_in_a_Postmold_Physicality_and_the_Archaeology_of_Culture-Making. 

Thompson, Andrew R. “New Dental and Isotope Evidence of Biological Distance and Place of Origin for Mass Burial Groups at Cahokia’s Mound 72.” Wiley Online Library, July 14, 2015. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.22791. 

Yates, Diana. “Ancient Bones, Teeth, Tell Story of Strife at Cahokia.” ILLINOIS, August 4, 2016. https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/391703.

Bands, the first classification of human social organization, consist of small groups of one hundred or less all related by blood or marriage. For the most part, hunter-gatherer groups live in these small societies. For most of our history as well, anthropologists suggest that all members of our species, Homo Sapiens, lived in bands.^[1] We were not the only ones, though. All our ancestors and our evolutionary cousins, Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, lived in these family bands as well. 

Neanderthals lived in Europe and West Asia starting 130,000 years ago and going extinct 40,000 years ago. They evolved from a European variant of the hominin Homo Heidelbergensis while our species evolved from the African variant. Neanderthals lived much like we did for most of our history, hunting game and foraging for plants. They looked very similar to us, save for a larger, longer skull, a shorter stature, a larger nose, and large eyes.

 They were similarly intelligent to us and created sophisticated technology for both hunting and domestic uses.^[2] They were spiritual people and some archaeologists suggest that they buried their dead.^[3] We know they cared for their families, but until recently, we did not know how these families operated. From various genetic studies, anthropologists determined that Neanderthals lived in small groups of ten to twenty individuals.^[4] Yet, a study published in October 2022 expanded on this information and gave us a greater understanding of Neanderthal family structures. 

In Chagyrskaya Cave and Okladnikov Cave in Southern Siberia, hundreds of thousands of bones belonging to eighty individuals were found. All remains were of similar periods. The finding of this many individuals together is a massive discovery because if a community’s genomes are all studied in context with their relatives and neighbors, there will be greater insight into the community and lives of these people – not just their evolution. 

The excavation and sequencing of bones in Chagyrskaya cave led to the discovery of the first Neanderthal father/daughter pair found. All other individuals sequenced from that cave were secondarily related as well save for two individuals. The study also looked into the roles of the sexes within Neanderthal society. DNA sequencing showed that the diversity of mitochondrial DNA was up to ten times greater than the diversity of Y chromosome DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down from a mother to her children only, so this evidence suggests that the women of the species were more mobile than the men, moving around to other groups when they found mates.^[5]

Genetic studies like this one from Chagyrskaya Cave can show an unknown side of behavior not yet seen before. Thrillingly, the excavation is not yet over. Only one-third of Chagyrskaya was excavated at the time of this study, and future discoveries only await further in the cave. 

1. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hunter-gatherer-culture/ 

2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Neanderthal/Neanderthal-classification#ref339688

3.https://australian.museum/blog/amri-news/this-month-in-archaeology-did-neanderthals-bury-their-dead/ 

4.https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1901789116 

5.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05283-y