Background Information- Becoming Corn People:
“Alfonso Ortiz, speaking from the perspective of his Puebloan, corn built culture, wrote: “The shift from gathering food to growing it ultimately entailed a changed relationship with the environment and altered the structures and organization of human societies. As people cleared lands, cultivated and stored foods, and adopted new technologies for farming, they became tied to the land in new ways and lived in more populous and sedentary communities, in villages, town, and finally cities. Corn, literally, made some Indian societies: ‘The great cultures, the enduring cultures, were all built on maize.’ At first, crop production supplemented and only gradually surpassed hunting and gathering as the principal means of subsistence. Corn did not produce instant and dramatic changes of lifestyle. Scholars debate the pace of the transition from forager to farmers, but increasing reliance on corn brought far-reaching change.
Corn may have changed peoples’ sense of their place in the universe. Calvin Martin argues that hunter-gatherers lived in confidence that animals would, eventually, always give themselves up, that nature would provide. Farmers lived with uncertainty-crops might fail, cosmic forces might withhold the rains. Mobile hunter-gatherers did not have priests. Farming communities, on the other hand, created ceremonial spaces and buildings devoted to ritual. Priests monopolized ritual and invoked their sacred knowledge to mediate with and propitiate the forces whose power hung over the lives of the crop-growers.”
“About the time the Normans were invading England and Christendom was embarking on the first Crusades, Mississippian culture peaked near present-day St. Louis with the emergence of the largest town in pre-Columbian North America, a paramount chiefdom unlike anything seen before or since. The town was long gone when the French arrived in the seventeenth century, but the French named the site Cahokia after the Indians of the Illinois confederacy who were living there.”
People lived in small sedentary villages with scattered farmsteads at or near the site by the sixth century, and a thousand or more people lived there around A.D. 1,000. Then things changed quite abruptly because of a phenomenon Timothy Pauketat chose to call a ‘Big Bang in the Bottom.’ Between 900 and 1200, a global warming trend correlated with an influx of moist tropical air to bring increased summer rainfall into the plains and allowed the adoption of farming in regions farther west than previously had been possible. During what archaeologists call the Lohmann phase, the people living in the American Bottom adopted full-scale corn agriculture. The people of Cahokia relied on corn, which grew well during the hot humid summers on the fertile floodplains. Population increased dramatically, settlement patterns were reorganized, people began to congregate in and around Cahokia in nucleated villages, a large town developed for the first time, and political power was consolidated.”
Materials:
•PDF Day Three Worksheet
•PDF Gilder Lehrman History Now, Issue Twenty-Eight, June 2011 or
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historynow/06_2011/historian2.php
Essential Questions:
What was Cahokia like at its zenith?
Why did Cahokia decline?
Objectives:
The student will be able identify features unique to the Cahokia civilization.
The student will be able to distinguish the religious practices of the Cahokia people.
The student will be to identify possible reasons for the decline of the Cahokia civilization.
Procedures
Direct Instruction:
The teacher will lead a discussion beginning with accessing the prior knowledge gained in the last two lessons. This lesson is the transition from Indians being to hunter/gatherers to living in a urban environment. The teacher may also access prior knowledge of other river civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egyptians, Indus, or/and Chinese) to emphasize the role of agriculture.
Then the teacher will introduce Cahokia with the fifteen video, City of the Sun. The video, City of the Sun, explores the Cahokia site, the people who built it, their beliefs, customs and daily lives. City of the Sun was produced by Donna Lawrence Productions, Inc. of Louisville, Kentucky, won a Gold Medal Award at the 33rd Annual International Film and Television Festival of New York. http://cahokiamounds.org/learn/video
The students will draw archaeological finds and architectural elements introduced in the video.
Processing Assignment and Direct Instruction:
The teacher, using the timeline tab of the Cahokia website, http://cahokiamounds.org/explore/timeline , will lead a discussion on the progression, rise and decline of the Cahokia civilization. The student will take illustrated notes, creating symbols or pictures for each century on his or her timeline. For instance, on the 700 AD tab, the student may draw a Clovis point on the 700 mark on his or her timeline.
Writing for Understanding: Using the Gilder Lehrman History Now article by Timothy Pauketat, the student will read the article and highlight the ‘who’s, what’s, where’s, when’s, why’s, and how’s of the Cahokia civilization. The purpose of the highlighting is to provide an organizational framework for the ‘writing for understanding’ assignment. Using the highlighted Gilder Lehrman History Now article by Timothy Pauketat, the student will choose one of the RAFTs to clarify, organize, and express what they have learned about the Cahokia. The RAFT table is organized from easiest to hardest. The newspaper article is the easiest to write especially with the article highlighted with the five w’s and how which fits perfectly to the format of a newspaper article. The hardest writing choice is the archaeologist. Encourage the writer to reread the article and retrieve references to specific archaeological findings. The student may also go to the archaeology part of the Cahokia website, http://cahokiamounds.org/explore/archaeology/origins , to find more specific details than included in Pauketat’s article.
“Alfonso Ortiz, speaking from the perspective of his Puebloan, corn built culture, wrote: “The shift from gathering food to growing it ultimately entailed a changed relationship with the environment and altered the structures and organization of human societies. As people cleared lands, cultivated and stored foods, and adopted new technologies for farming, they became tied to the land in new ways and lived in more populous and sedentary communities, in villages, town, and finally cities. Corn, literally, made some Indian societies: ‘The great cultures, the enduring cultures, were all built on maize.’ At first, crop production supplemented and only gradually surpassed hunting and gathering as the principal means of subsistence. Corn did not produce instant and dramatic changes of lifestyle. Scholars debate the pace of the transition from forager to farmers, but increasing reliance on corn brought far-reaching change.
Corn may have changed peoples’ sense of their place in the universe. Calvin Martin argues that hunter-gatherers lived in confidence that animals would, eventually, always give themselves up, that nature would provide. Farmers lived with uncertainty-crops might fail, cosmic forces might withhold the rains. Mobile hunter-gatherers did not have priests. Farming communities, on the other hand, created ceremonial spaces and buildings devoted to ritual. Priests monopolized ritual and invoked their sacred knowledge to mediate with and propitiate the forces whose power hung over the lives of the crop-growers.”
“About the time the Normans were invading England and Christendom was embarking on the first Crusades, Mississippian culture peaked near present-day St. Louis with the emergence of the largest town in pre-Columbian North America, a paramount chiefdom unlike anything seen before or since. The town was long gone when the French arrived in the seventeenth century, but the French named the site Cahokia after the Indians of the Illinois confederacy who were living there.”
People lived in small sedentary villages with scattered farmsteads at or near the site by the sixth century, and a thousand or more people lived there around A.D. 1,000. Then things changed quite abruptly because of a phenomenon Timothy Pauketat chose to call a ‘Big Bang in the Bottom.’ Between 900 and 1200, a global warming trend correlated with an influx of moist tropical air to bring increased summer rainfall into the plains and allowed the adoption of farming in regions farther west than previously had been possible. During what archaeologists call the Lohmann phase, the people living in the American Bottom adopted full-scale corn agriculture. The people of Cahokia relied on corn, which grew well during the hot humid summers on the fertile floodplains. Population increased dramatically, settlement patterns were reorganized, people began to congregate in and around Cahokia in nucleated villages, a large town developed for the first time, and political power was consolidated.”
Materials:
•PDF Day Three Worksheet
•PDF Gilder Lehrman History Now, Issue Twenty-Eight, June 2011 or
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historynow/06_2011/historian2.php
Essential Questions:
What was Cahokia like at its zenith?
Why did Cahokia decline?
Objectives:
The student will be able identify features unique to the Cahokia civilization.
The student will be able to distinguish the religious practices of the Cahokia people.
The student will be to identify possible reasons for the decline of the Cahokia civilization.
Procedures
Direct Instruction:
The teacher will lead a discussion beginning with accessing the prior knowledge gained in the last two lessons. This lesson is the transition from Indians being to hunter/gatherers to living in a urban environment. The teacher may also access prior knowledge of other river civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egyptians, Indus, or/and Chinese) to emphasize the role of agriculture.
Then the teacher will introduce Cahokia with the fifteen video, City of the Sun. The video, City of the Sun, explores the Cahokia site, the people who built it, their beliefs, customs and daily lives. City of the Sun was produced by Donna Lawrence Productions, Inc. of Louisville, Kentucky, won a Gold Medal Award at the 33rd Annual International Film and Television Festival of New York. http://cahokiamounds.org/learn/video
The students will draw archaeological finds and architectural elements introduced in the video.
Processing Assignment and Direct Instruction:
The teacher, using the timeline tab of the Cahokia website, http://cahokiamounds.org/explore/timeline , will lead a discussion on the progression, rise and decline of the Cahokia civilization. The student will take illustrated notes, creating symbols or pictures for each century on his or her timeline. For instance, on the 700 AD tab, the student may draw a Clovis point on the 700 mark on his or her timeline.
Writing for Understanding: Using the Gilder Lehrman History Now article by Timothy Pauketat, the student will read the article and highlight the ‘who’s, what’s, where’s, when’s, why’s, and how’s of the Cahokia civilization. The purpose of the highlighting is to provide an organizational framework for the ‘writing for understanding’ assignment. Using the highlighted Gilder Lehrman History Now article by Timothy Pauketat, the student will choose one of the RAFTs to clarify, organize, and express what they have learned about the Cahokia. The RAFT table is organized from easiest to hardest. The newspaper article is the easiest to write especially with the article highlighted with the five w’s and how which fits perfectly to the format of a newspaper article. The hardest writing choice is the archaeologist. Encourage the writer to reread the article and retrieve references to specific archaeological findings. The student may also go to the archaeology part of the Cahokia website, http://cahokiamounds.org/explore/archaeology/origins , to find more specific details than included in Pauketat’s article.