Thanks for the thoughtful response. Actually, Pauketat discusses some of the possibilities you mention, specifically the idea that the mass burials represent some kind of clan warfare -- the elimination of one high-status family by another, for example. That was known among the Maya but not otherwise common (he says), one piece of circumstantial evidence that may link Cahokia to Mesoamerica.

Pauketat describes a place called the Junkyard Mound, excavated in advance of motel construction in the '50s, where an especially interesting burial was found: three executed adult women, including one with a small baby and one who actually died in childbirth, interred along with a big jumble of bones, reflecting maybe 170 people who had died over many years. This has been interpreted as the elimination (and also commemoration) of an important rival bloodline -- and also as evidence that Cahokia, like many other Native societies, conferred status through the matrilineal bloodline.

Now, whatever happened at Mound 72 was somewhat different, with so many people killed at once around those two major dudes and decent evidence that the female sacrifices came from outside Cahokia proper. Some burials there lend credence to Pauketat's idea that an elaborate, theatrical ritual was involved -- there were four men found bound together, with their heads and hands cut off. (Another circumstantial Mesoamerica link.) Symbolic objects were placed in the grave: Bundles of arrows pointing in opposite directions, a package of mica crystals, etc.

Pauketat's idea that the whole thing basically amounted to "the king is dead, long live the king" sounds plausible, if only because that's the worldwide No. 1 reason for high-status burials. But you're absolutely right to point out (as he does) that this was clearly a complicated society with some kind of political, economic and/or religious conflict going on, and all we can do at this point is make guesses.

Obviously all I'm giving you is my own line of Holiday Inn Express 2-second expertise. You're obviously an archaeology buff who will find Pauketat's book fascinating. (There are a couple of recent scholarly pubs about Cahokia as well; not sure how/whether their arguments differ.)

No one is claiming they were literally virgins. That's headline-writing poetic license. I don't use the word in the article, and Pauketat doesn't use it in the book.

On the other hand, there is ample physical and circumstantial evidence to indicate that the 53 women sacrificed alongside the "beaded burial" were of a lower social status than the two men. They were relatively malnourished, and their bodies were all piled together in one big pit, rather than ceremoniously placed atop a platform like the two men. Male sacrifice victims were probably lower-status too, but there aren't nearly as many of them.

I'm really grateful for what you've brought to this discussion, thank you. And that includes the criticisms, expressed in civil terms (which can be rare on the Internet).

I completely agree that terms like literacy and historicity are culturally loaded. In writing for a mass media outlet on the Internet (and in the United States, and in English) I am very much inside the cultural context of those terms. We could discuss this a lot further, but I'll just add that the context doesn't really allow the freedom to interrogate terms like those at any length.

Your other possibly valid point, about the sensationalism of focusing on the most gruesome details in a nuanced archaeological account, has I think been addressed by others. Yes, there might be more balanced ways to describe Cahokia. I believe Salon has a mission to further public discourse, but we are also a business, competing with other for reader eyeballs and advertiser dollars. The article got a lot of people to engage with Native American history, and I'm profoundly grateful to have offered that opportunity.

To the point raised by several readers: If we're using the accepted Western concept of "literacy" (whose value dry-eyed has disputed), then out of all New World Native cultures, only the Maya were a fully literate civilization. (Spanish priests destroyed virtually all Mayan books as works of the devil, which strikes me as one of the Catholic Church's cruelest crimes -- a genocide against literature.) The Aztecs had a form of pictographic or rebus writing, used principally for recordkeeping and dynastic history. The Incas had no form of writing at all (they used a system of knotted strings to keep material records), which for such an advanced civilization is unusual.

As dry-eyed has pointed out, the oral tradition is immensely important in trying to understand Native American culture. No oral history regarding Cahokia is known to have survived in any Native tradition, and no one knows why. It's a pretty big mystery, as is the question of what became of Mississippian culture, which vanished entirely from that region around the year 1400. When whites first got there 250 or so years later, that part of the Mississippi Valley (roughly from St Louis to Memphis) was virtually uninhabited. Pauketat wonders whether Cahokian civilization had such a bad ending that people scattered in various directions and did their best to erase the whole thing from their personal and cultural memory banks.

about this:

is it possible that the Aztecs,Maya and Inca originated with the Mound Builders?

This actually can't be ruled out as a possibility, although it's not super likely in the case of the Incas.

Yes, Cahokia arises around 1050 AD, but there are mounds (aka earthen pyramids) in the Deep South built more than 5,000 years ago. Pauketat says that some archaeologists, when discussing the possible connections between the Mesoamericans and the Mississippians, like to joke that New World civilization began in Louisiana and then was exported south to Mexico, before coming north again. Totally unproven and likely unprovable, but not outside the bounds of possibility.