Covering topics as diverse as economic modeling, craft specialization, settlement patterns, agricultural and subsistence systems, and the development of social ranking, Cahokia and the Hinterlands explores cultural interactions among Cahokians and the inhabitants of other population centers, including Orensdorf and the Dickson Mounds in Illinois and Aztalan in Wisconsin, as well as sites in Minnesota, Iowa, and at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Proposing sophisticated and innovative models for the growth, development, and decline of Mississippian culture at Cahokia and elsewhere, this volume also provides insight into the rise of chiefdoms and stratified societies and the development of trade throughout the world.
 

Thomas E. Emerson, director of the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of Cahokia and the Archaeology of Power.R. Barry Lewis, an associate professor of anthropology at UIUC, is the editor of Kentucky Archaeology and, with Charles Stout, Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces.