How was Cahokia governed?

This is one of the most actively debated questions in Cahokia archaeology, and the debate has significant implications for how we understand the city’s organization, its social dynamics, and its capacity to achieve what it clearly achieved.

The traditional anthropological model for Mississippian societies was the chiefdom — a political form characterized by hereditary inequality, in which a chief derived authority from birth and exercised power over a territory and population through a combination of redistribution, coercion, and religious legitimacy.

In this model, Cahokia was a paramount chiefdom, with a supreme chief at the apex of a hierarchy that extended downward through subordinate chiefs, lineage heads, and ordinary commoners.