A review of archaeologist Timothy Pauketat's new book on the Mississippian capital of Cahokia appeared in Salon last week, with the gaudy title "Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi".
In it, reviewer Andrew O'Hehir calls Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi a "cautious but mesmerizing" account of the archaeological discoveries at the site, which certainly included lots of human sacrifices, even if the virgins are pure speculation on the headline-writer's part.
About 1100 AD, Cahokia was a true urban capital with a population of +20,000, the third-largest pyramid in the New World (Monk's Mound, seen in the photo) and an elite ruling class led by political-religious leaders. O'Hehir's main point is that the site and the Mississippian civilization in general has been ignored by most European Americans because it doesn't fit the traditional paradigm of prehistoric Native Americans as eco-friendly hunter-gatherers. That alone is worth saying, especially to us public archaeology types, because although we are aware of the complexity of North American precolumbian societies we obviously haven't been pushing that information adequately.
I always like to see articles in high profile media places, and I don't even mind the gaudy title, particularly when the subject is so clearly one that needs to be introduced to the modern general public. How about you? Does a gaudy title hurt or help archaeology aims?
- Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi, in Salon
- Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi, PriceGrabber
- Cahokia, glossary entry
- Mississippian, more on the ancient civilization
Comments
Repetition functions as one of our most honored and utilized teaching-learning devices. While archaeologists dig through a great deal of garbage, repeating garbage explanations, i.e. confusion of Aztec, Maya and Inca traits, Interplanetary travelers brought civilization to the Earth, or sacrifice of virgins was a common “savage” trait, does little to enhance the profession or its followers. Please revise the question to encourage more substantial response. In what ways…?
Attention-grabbing headlines’ cost/benefit ratio depends on the article(s) to which they direct our attention. A good article will justify some functional hyperbole in the headline.
A bad article might be the sort of thing to which we really wouldn’t want attention diverted.
The Salon piece wasn’t too bad, though I question the wisdom of inclusions such as the speculation that female sacrificial victims were selected for their beauty; who knows what selection criteria were actually in play? Maybe they were selected because they were ugly, or because their fathers had large noses. We will probably never know.
Here’s an article about the review, from the St. Louis Post Dispatch (St. Louis is across the river from Cahokia), with a quote from Pauketat:
‘Cool things’ coalesce at Cahokia
I found the article interesting, informative — but the title was a bit too sensational and flashy. And this bit bothered me — “Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) …” Or, quite possibly selected for being cross-eyed, or troublemakers, or too many mouths to feed for the family, or they drew the short straws? I know from reacing Kathy Reichs that one can determine whether a skeleton is female, and can often get a ballpark idea of age — but I’m pretty sure that we can’t know whether the Cahokia sacrifices were virgins who met their culture’s standards for beauty.
Sensationalistic headlines are stupid and unnecessary. Archaeology is an attention-grabber all by itself, in newspapers and non-technical magazines. Was it William Randolph Hearst who said that “sex and archaeology will always sell papers”? And the sensational headlines detract from and diminish the importance of the subject at hand.
Actually there were no “sacrifices” either. They were warriors.