Elements of Cahokian Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods were actively constructed during the late-eleventh century in the American Bottom, resulting in a social order that transcended pre-Mississippian village life. Architectural patterns and craft production debris within the greater central complex indicate possible religious, if not political or ethnic, divisions that did not form organically. The central problems in this analysis include distinguishing residential neighborhoodsfrom other kinds of occupational zones and human neighbors from other-than-human residents. To this end, we generate new measures of architectural diversity, density, and positioning to identify the elements of Cahokian neighborhoods and examine how they were created and reconfigured using data recovered from large-scale excavations at East St. Louis and Cahokia.