The ability to mark the movements of celestial bodies with precision was, in many Indigenous religious traditions, an expression of the relationship between human communities and the cosmic order — a way of demonstrating that human leaders understood and participated in the rhythms that governed the natural world.

The mortuary evidence from Cahokia provides another window into the city’s ceremonial life — and raises some of the most compelling and most disturbing questions about its social organization.

Mound 72, a small ridge-top mound at Cahokia, contained a burial assemblage that has been among the most studied and most debated in American archaeology.

When excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, the mound was found to contain the remains of more than 270 people, some clearly of high status and others apparently sacrificed in ways associated with the burial of important individuals.

The most famous feature of the Mound 72 assemblage is the “beaded burial” — the remains of a man laid on a platform or blanket of more than 20,000 marine shell beads, accompanied by other objects of clear value and significance: arrow points in bundles, rolled copper sheets, mica, and other materials.