Read People of the Morning Star Online
Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Native American & Aboriginal
People of the Morning Star
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To Margaret Withey
For the gift of our best friend,
the Saratoga Tedi Bear,
and
your help when Michael needed it most
during those hard times in graduate school.
We haven’t forgotten.
Acknowledgments
First we’d like to recognize our superb team at Tor/Forge books. Our publisher, Tom Doherty, has supported the First North Americans, or “People” series since the beginning. Tom has always believed in telling our nation’s story as a means of perpetuating an understanding of what it truly means to be “an American.” Especially when that story spins out of our Native American heritage.
Linda Quinton, Tor’s associate publisher, has served as our guiding light for over twenty-five years. This is our chance to express our thanks for the times that she’s listened patiently while we ranted, reassured us when we cried on her shoulder, and always given it to us straight. Bless you, Linda.
Our editor, Susan Chang, is the strong third leg of our Tor tripod. How can we ever thank you for your enthusiasm, critical eye, and endless support for our work? Susan, without you we’d be lost.
Special mention must go to Dr. Laura Scheiber for helping us to establish connections. To Dr. Tim Pauketat, we say thanks for your time at the Society for American Archaeology in Memphis; we didn’t forget Old-Woman-Who-Never-Dies and the immense influence she had on Cahokia. When we mentioned the possibility of a new Cahokia book, an ebullient Dr. David Anderson grinned across his glass of beer and said, “Great! Go for it!” Thanks for your support over the years, David.
In writing
People of the Morning Star,
we have relied heavily on the research of many, but would like to specifically single out Tim Pauketat, James Brown, Robert L. Hall, F. Kent Reilly III, George Lankford, James F. Garber, John Kelly, William Iseminger, Thomas Emerson, George Holley, and so many others.
We were struggling over how to interpret Cahokia’s political structure, when at the 2012 Society for American Archaeology meetings in Memphis, Dr. Gerardo Gutierrez, backed by Dr. Stephen Lekson, provided us with a viable hypothesis: something similar to the Altepetl system of political organization. From it we have postulated the Cahokian “Houses” used in the novel. To Dr. Gutierrez, and Steve Lekson (again), our most sincere thanks.
Finally we extend our thanks to the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society. Not only do they manage one of the greatest archaeological sites in North America, but the museum shop has carried our books and supported our work for more than twenty years now. We urge everyone to visit the Cahokia Mounds site and to tour the magnificent museum. You can contact them at
www.cahokiamounds.org
.
Contents
Map of the greater city of Cahokia
Map of Central City/Morning Star Town
Tor and Forge titles by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
Nonfiction Introduction
Archaeological research has revolutionized our understanding of the great site at Cahokia since we wrote
People of the River
in 1991. Today that novel still describes what researchers now call “Old Cahokia” at the end of the Edlehardt cultural phase, which ended at 1050
C.E.
At that time, we went out on a controversial limb and referred to Cahokia as a state because it made sense. Today researchers talk in terms of “imperial” Cahokia; as research has advanced, that, too, now makes sense.
A younger generation of archaeologists, such as Tim Pauketat, John Kelly, Kent Reilly, and others have beaten their way out of “processual” archaeology’s straightjacket and taken a new look at Cahokia and its impact. In many ways, Cahokia was to North America as Rome was to Europe. Even today its stamp on Native American culture remains.
Cahokia, at its height, consisted of a series of mound centers built in strategic locations across the American Bottom on the eastern floodplain of the Mississippi and at St. Louis itself. Each appears to have been a semi-autonomous politico-religious center tied to its peers through a shared mythology.
At the beginning of the Lohmann phase at around 1050
C.E.
, something miraculous happened at Cahokia; what Dr. Tim Pauketat calls the “Big Bang.” People, in the tens of thousands, from all over the American Midwest picked up and migrated to Cahokia. They brought their traditional designs, pottery, and household architecture, along, with their peculiar styles of clothing, kinship, and languages, and settled every bit of arable land in and around Cahokia.