In 1183, a Chinese Poet Describes Being Domesticated by His Own Cats

in History, Poetry | September 9th, 2020

Here in Korea, where I live, cat own­ers aren’t called cat own­ers: they’re called goyan­gi jib­sa, lit­er­al­ly “cat but­lers.” Clear­ly the idea that felines have flipped the domes­tic-ani­mal script, not serv­ing humans but being served by humans, tran­scends cul­tures. It also goes far back in his­to­ry: wit­ness the 12th-cen­tu­ry vers­es recent­ly tweet­ed out in trans­la­tion by writer Xiran Jay Zhao, in which “Song dynasty poet Lu You” — one of the most pro­lif­ic lit­er­ary artists of his time and place — “poem-live­blogged his descent from cat own­er to cat slave.”

The sto­ry begins in 1138, writes Zhao, when “Down On His Luck schol­ar-offi­cial Lu You gets a cat because rats keep munch­ing on his books.” The eight poems in this series begin with praise for the ani­mal — “It’s so soft to touch and warm to hold in bed / So brave and capa­ble that it has oust­ed the rat nest” — and goes on to describe the cats he sub­se­quent­ly acquires, who self­less­ly van­quish the house­hold rats while indulging in noth­ing more than the occa­sion­al cat­nip binge.

Or at least they do at first. “Night after night you used to mas­sacre rats / Guard­ing the grain store so fero­cious­ly,” Lu asks one in “Poem for Pink-Nose.” “So why do you now act as if you live with­in palace walls / Eat­ing fish every day and sleep­ing in my bed?”

As time goes on, Lu finds him­self “serv­ing fish on time” to his cats only to find them “sleep­ing with­out wor­ry.” As the rats ram­page, he poet­i­cal­ly moans, “my books are get­ting ruined and the birds wake me before dawn.” Has it all been noth­ing more than “a ruse to get food from me?”

Yet it seems that Lu has no regrets about cat own­er­ship, if own­er­ship be the word. “Wind sweeps the world and rain dark­ens the vil­lage / Rum­bles roll off the moun­tains like ocean waves churn­ing,” he writes in 1192’s “A Rain­storm on the Fourth Day of the Eleventh Month.” Yet “the fur­nace is sooth­ing and the rug is warm / Me and my cat are not leav­ing the house.” This is relat­able con­tent for the cat but­lers of Korea (a cul­ture thor­ough­ly influ­enced by Chi­na in Lu’s day), or indeed any­where else in the world. The patri­ot­ic poet would sure­ly be pleased by the mod­ern-day ascent of Chi­na — and per­haps just as much by the high and ever-ris­ing sta­tus of the domes­tic cat.

via Xiran

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Two Cats Keep Try­ing to Get Into a Japan­ese Art Muse­um … and Keep Get­ting Turned Away: Meet the Thwart­ed Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

T.S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats & Oth­er Clas­sic Poems (75 Min­utes, 1955)

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

Free Chi­nese Lessons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Scorsese’s Taxi Driver Reimagined as the 1970s Sitcom, Taxi

in Random | September 9th, 2020

And next up, to keep the nos­tal­gia going, watch Samuel Beck­ett star in the open­ing cred­its of an imag­i­nary 70s cop show. Enjoy.…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Brand New Short Film, Made Entire­ly in His Office Under Quar­an­tine

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

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David Lynch’s Popular Surrealism Considered on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #59

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | September 9th, 2020

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt–along with guest Mike Wilson–discuss the direc­tor’s films from Eraser­head to Inland Empire plus Twin Peaks and his recent short films. We get into the appeal and the styl­is­tic and sto­ry­telling hall­marks of his main­stays–Blue Vel­vet, Wild at Heart, Lost High­way, and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve–and also con­sid­er out­liers like Dune, The Ele­phant Man, and The Straight Sto­ry.

What’s with the campy act­ing and the weird atti­tudes toward women? Why make us stare at some­thing mov­ing very slow­ly for a long time? Are these films appeal­ing to young peo­ple inter­est­ed in some­thing dif­fer­ent but not on the whole actu­al­ly enjoy­able? Is there actu­al­ly a “solu­tion” to make sense of the sense­less, or are these wacky plots sup­posed to remain unas­sim­i­l­able and so not dis­mis­si­ble?

Some arti­cles we drew on includ­ed:

Also, read Roger Ebert’s reviews of Dune and Blue Vel­vet, and his sub­se­quent thoughts on the lat­ter. What did crit­ics say about “What Did Jack Do?” Watch “Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained.”  Check out his short films if you can sit through them.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. If you’re not sub­scribed to the pod­cast, then you missed last week’s aftertalk high­lights episode. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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The Fall of Civilizations Podcast Engagingly Explores the Collapse of Civilizations & Empires Throughout History

in History, Podcasts | September 8th, 2020

Now the coun­try does not even boast a tree.

—Robert Brown­ing, “Love Among the Ruins”

Every empire seems to think (as much as empires seem to think) that it will be the one to out­last them all. And all of them have end­ed up more or less the same way in the end. This isn’t just a gloomy fact of human his­to­ry, it’s a fact of entropy, mor­tal­i­ty, and the lin­ear expe­ri­ence of time. If impe­r­i­al rulers forget—begin to think them­selves immortal—there have always been poets to remind them, though maybe not so direct­ly. Epic poet­ry often legit­imizes the found­ing of empires. Anoth­er form, the poet­ry of ruin, inter­prets their inevitable demise.

All the Roman­tics were doing it, and so too was an unknown 8th cen­tu­ry British poet who encoun­tered Roman ruins dur­ing the so-called “Dark Ages.” The poem they left behind “gives us a glimpse of a world of mys­tery,” says Paul Coop­er above in episode one of his Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions pod­cast, which begins with Roman Britain and con­tin­ues, in each sub­se­quent (but not chrono­log­i­cal) episode, to explore the col­lapse of empires around the world through lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture. “Every ruin,” says Coop­er in an inter­view with the North Star Pod­cast, “is a place where a phys­i­cal object was torn apart, and that hap­pened because of some his­tor­i­cal force.”

We are enthralled with ruins, though this can seem like the prod­uct of a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern sensibility—that of the poets who inhab­it­ed what nov­el­ist Rose Macaulay called in her 1953 study Plea­sure of Ruins “a ruined and ruinous world.”

But as our Old Eng­lish poet above demon­strates, the fas­ci­na­tion pre­dates Shake­speare and Mar­lowe. Coop­er would know. He has ded­i­cat­ed his life to study­ing and writ­ing about ruins, earn­ing a PhD in their cul­tur­al and lit­er­ary sig­nif­i­cance. Along the way, he has writ­ten for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, Dis­cov­er Mag­a­zine, and the BBC.

Coop­er also began pub­lish­ing one of the most intrigu­ing Twit­ter feeds in 2017, detail­ing in “sev­er­al nest­ed threads” var­i­ous “ruin-relat­ed thoughts and feel­ings,” as Shru­ti Ravin­dran writes at Tim­ber Media. His tweets became so pop­u­lar that he turned them into a pod­cast, and it is not your stan­dard infor­mal­ly chat­ty pod­cast fare. Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions engages deeply with its sub­jects on their own terms, and avoids the sen­sa­tion­al­ist clich­es of so much pop­u­lar his­to­ry. Coop­er “knew, for cer­tain, what he want­ed to avoid,” when he began: the “focus on grue­some tor­ture tech­niques, exe­cu­tions, and the sex­ca­pades of nobles.”

“His­to­ry writ­ers often don’t trust their audi­ence will be inter­est­ed in the past if they don’t Hol­ly­wood­ize it,” says Coop­er. Instead, in the lat­est episode on the Byzan­tine Empire he recruits the choir from the Greek Ortho­dox Cathe­dral in Lon­don, “and a num­ber of musi­cians play­ing tra­di­tion­al Byzan­tine instru­ments such as the Byzan­tine lyra, the Qanun and the Greek San­tur,” he explains. In his episode on the Han dynasty, Coop­er looks back through “ancient Chi­nese poet­ry, songs and folk music” to the empire’s rise, “its remark­able tech­no­log­i­cal advances, and its first, ten­ta­tive attempts to make con­tact with the empires of the west.”

This is a rich jour­ney through ancient his­to­ry, guid­ed by a mas­ter sto­ry­teller ded­i­cat­ed to tak­ing ruins seri­ous­ly. (Coop­er has pub­lished a nov­el about ruins, Riv­er of Ink, “inspired by time spent in UNESCO sites in Sri Lan­ka,” Ravin­dran reports.) There is “love among the ruins,” wrote Robert Brown­ing, and there is poet­ry and music and sto­ry and song—all of it brought to bear in Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions to “make sense about what must have hap­pened,” says Coop­er. Find more episodes, on fall­en civ­i­liza­tions all around the world, on YouTube or head to Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions to sub­scribe through the pod­cast ser­vice of your choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Lit­er­a­ture Pod­cast Takes You on a Lit­er­ary Jour­ney: From Ancient Epics to Con­tem­po­rary Clas­sics

Watch Ancient Ruins Get Restored to their Glo­ri­ous Orig­i­nal State with Ani­mat­ed GIFs: The Tem­ple of Jupiter, Lux­or Tem­ple & More

The His­to­ry of Lit­er­a­ture Pod­cast Takes You on a Lit­er­ary Jour­ney: From Ancient Epics to Con­tem­po­rary Clas­sics

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Charlie Parker Changed Jazz Forever

in Music | September 8th, 2020

Jazz has often moved for­ward in seis­mic shifts, pow­ered by rev­o­lu­tion­ary fig­ures who make every­thing that came before them seem quaint by com­par­i­son and radi­ate their influ­ence beyond the jazz world. Per­haps no fig­ure epit­o­mizes such a leap for­ward more than Char­lie Park­er. The leg­endary inven­tor of bebop, born a lit­tle over a cen­tu­ry ago, may be the most uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed and admired musi­cian in jazz, and far beyond.

Kansas City trum­pet play­er Lon­nie McFad­den, who grew up hear­ing sto­ries about home­town hero Park­er, was told by every­one he met to learn from the mas­ter. “Every­body. It was a con­sen­sus. All of them said, ‘You got to lis­ten to Bird. You got to lis­ten to Char­lie Park­er.’” Fur­ther­more, he says, “every tap dancer I know, every jazz musi­cian I know, every rock and blues musi­cian I know hon­ors Char­lie Park­er.”

Park­er has been called “The Great­est Indi­vid­ual Musi­cian Who Ever Lived.” Not just jazz musi­cian, but musi­cian, peri­od, as the PBS Sound Field short intro­duc­tion above notes, because there had nev­er been one sin­gle musi­cian who influ­enced “all instru­ments.” Kansas City sax­o­phone play­er Bob­by Wat­son and archivist Chuck Had­dix explain how Park­er made such an impact at such a young age, before dying at 34.

Unlike the swing of Ben­ny Good­man or Louis Arm­strong, Parker’s bebop is com­plete­ly non-dance­able. He didn’t care. He was not an enter­tain­er, he insist­ed, but an artist. Jazz might even­tu­al­ly return to dance­abil­i­ty in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, but the music—and pop­u­lar music writ large—would nev­er be the same.

The video’s host, LA Buck­n­er gives a brief sum­ma­ry of the evo­lu­tion of jazz in four region­al centers—New Orleans, Chica­go, Kansas City, and New York. Park­er made a tran­sit through the last three of these cities, even­tu­al­ly end­ing up on big apple stages. “By 1944,” Jazz­wise writes, “the altoist was… mak­ing a huge impact on the young Turks hang­ing out in Harlem, Dizzy Gille­spie and Thelo­nious Monk in par­tic­u­lar… no one had ever played sax­o­phone in this man­ner before, the har­mon­ic, rhyth­mic and melod­ic imag­i­na­tion and the emo­tion­al inten­si­ty prov­ing an over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence.”

It’s too bad more musi­cians didn’t lis­ten to Bird when it came to play­ing high. “Any­one who said they played bet­ter when on drugs or booze ‘are liars. I know,’” he said. Hero­in and alco­hol abuse end­ed his career pre­ma­ture­ly, but per­haps no sin­gle instru­men­tal musi­cian since has cast a longer shad­ow. Jazz crit­ic Stan­ley Crouch, author of Park­er biog­ra­phy Kansas City Light­ning: The Rise and Times of Char­lie Park­er, explains in an inter­view how Park­er cre­at­ed his own mys­tique.

Park­er some­times gave the impres­sion that he was large­ly a nat­ur­al, an inno­cent into whom the cos­mos poured its knowl­edge while nev­er both­er­ing his con­scious­ness with expla­na­tions.

The facts of his devel­op­ment were quite dif­fer­ent. He worked for every­thing he got, and when­ev­er pos­si­ble, he did that work in asso­ci­a­tion with a mas­ter.

Park­er was not appre­ci­at­ed at first, either in his home­town of Kansas City or in New York, where “peo­ple didn’t like the way he played” when he first arrived in 1939. He respond­ed to crit­i­cism with cease­less prac­tice, learn­ing, and exper­i­men­ta­tion, an almost super­hu­man work eth­ic that prob­a­bly wasn’t great for his health but has grown into a leg­end all its own, giv­ing musi­cians in every form of music a mod­el of ded­i­ca­tion, inten­si­ty, and fear­less­ness to strive toward.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in the Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music of 3 Char­lie Park­er Jazz Clas­sics: “Con­fir­ma­tion,” “Au Pri­vave” & “Bloom­di­do”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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IKEA Digitizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Catalogs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Furniture Giant

in Business, Design | September 8th, 2020

The time­less mod­ernism of the IKEA cat­a­log, its promise of tidi­ness, clean, eco­nom­i­cal lines, and excel­lent val­ue belie a strug­gle ahead, an ordeal cus­tomers of the glob­al Swedish build-it-your­self jug­ger­naut know too well. Will the bulky, major­ly-incon­ve­nient­ly shaped box­es fit in the car? Will the rebus-like instruc­tions make sense? Will we assem­ble a bed with love and care, only to find our­selves in a pile of its bro­ken parts come morn­ing?

Clear­ly out­weigh­ing such tragedies are the many hap­py mem­o­ries we asso­ciate with buy­ing, build­ing, and liv­ing with IKEA prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny itself has built such mem­o­ries over the course of almost eight decades with an empire of Scan­di­na­vian design super­mar­kets.

“As of 2019,” Marie Pati­no writes at City­Lab, “IKEA boasts 433 stores across 53 coun­tries.” The IKEA cat­a­log is as wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed as the Bible and Quran. The Swedish com­pa­ny with the quirk­i­ly named prod­ucts and leg­endary cafe­te­ria meat­balls defines fur­ni­ture shop­ping.

The lay­out of IKEA’s show­rooms may turn “retail into retail ther­a­py,” with cor­ri­dors filled with mono­chro­mat­ic visions of clut­ter-free liv­ing. In these times, of course, we’re far more like­ly to take refuge in those ven­er­a­ble cat­a­logs or the company’s always-improv­ing web­site. Now we can do both at once with a trip through sev­en decades of IKEA cat­a­logs, uploaded to the web­site for the 70th anniver­sary of the first 1950 release.

1951 “marked the first prop­er IKEA cat­a­log,” writes Pati­no, as well as the first icon­ic cov­er fea­tur­ing the first icon­ic design, the MK wing chair. Cov­ers became more elab­o­rate, with smooth mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern liv­ing room lay­outs that tan­ta­lized, but the con­tents of the cat­a­log looked like gov­ern­ment order forms until the late 60s and 70s. It did not appear in Eng­lish until 1985. In these ear­ly lay­outs we can see just how dat­ed so many of these designs appear in hind­sight.

The company’s sig­na­ture busi­ness mod­el came togeth­er slow­ly at first. It start­ed in 1943, found­ed by Ing­var Kam­prad in Swe­den, as a mail-order busi­ness for sta­tion­ary sup­plies. The fur­ni­ture arrived soon after, but it would take anoth­er decade or so for the flat-pack idea to ful­ly emerge. The BILLY book­shelf, per­haps the most pop­u­lar IKEA design ever, debuted in 1979. Oth­er sta­ples fol­lowed, and in 2013, the orig­i­nal wing­back chair made a mod­i­fied come­back as the STRANDMON. Through it all, the cat­a­log has doc­u­ment­ed Swedish design trends in a glob­al mar­ket­place.,

The 21st cen­tu­ry has seen not only the return of the wing­back but of the mid-cen­tu­ry Scan­di­na­vian mod­ernism with which the com­pa­ny made its name in the 1950s and 60s. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to think of IKEA as con­sis­tent­ly embody­ing this trend, slight­ly updat­ed every few years. But brows­ing through these cat­a­logs shows how thor­ough­ly IKEA absorbed all sorts of Euro­pean influences—as well as the look of hotel room fur­ni­ture from Mia­mi Vice.

What kind of ther­a­py is this? Gaz­ing at dat­ed or retro-hip prod­ucts we are years too late to buy? It offers the same expe­ri­ence as all IKEA cat­a­log shopping—without the strug­gle and expense of trans­port­ing and assem­bling the results: the dis­trac­tion of a world with­out dis­trac­tions. Explore the new archive of IKEA cat­a­logs here.

via Bloomberg and Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­sive Har­rods Cat­a­logue from 1912 Gets Dig­i­tized: Before Ama­zon, Har­rods Offered “Every­thing for Every­one, Every­where”

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

Meet the Mem­phis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Design­ers of David Bowie’s Favorite Fur­ni­ture

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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MIT Presents a Free Course on the COVID-19 Pandemic, Featuring Anthony Fauci & Other Experts

in Biology, Current Affairs, Health, MIT, Online Courses | September 8th, 2020

Most of us use the terms “coro­n­avirus” and “COVID-19” to refer to the pan­dem­ic that has gone around the world this year. We do know, or can fig­ure out, that the for­mer term refers to a virus and the lat­ter to the dis­ease caused by that virus. But do we know the full name “severe acute res­pi­ra­to­ry syn­drome coro­n­avirus 2,” or “SARS-CoV­‑2” for short? We will if we take the online course “COVID-19, SARS-CoV­‑2 and the Pan­dem­ic,” which MIT is mak­ing avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic free online. We’ll also learn what makes both the virus and the dis­ease dif­fer­ent from oth­er virus­es and dis­eases, what we can do to avoid infec­tion, and how close we are to an effec­tive treat­ment.

All this is laid out in the course’s first lec­ture by Bruce Walk­er, direc­tor of the Ragon Insti­tute of Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, MIT and Har­vard. Walk­er intro­duces him­self by telling us how he grad­u­at­ed from med­ical school when HIV was at its height in Amer­i­ca, tim­ing that placed him well for a career focused on dead­ly viral dis­eases.

The course’s com­plete line­up of guest lec­tur­ers, all of them list­ed on its syl­labus, includes many oth­er high-pro­file fig­ures in the field of epi­demi­ol­o­gy, immunol­o­gy, vac­cine devel­op­ment, and relat­ed fields: Har­vard’s Michael Mina, Yale’s Akiko Iwasa­ki, the Broad Insti­tute’s Eric Lan­der, and — per­haps you’ve heard of him — the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases’ Antho­ny Fau­ci (find his ses­sion below).

“COVID-19, SARS-CoV­‑2 and the Pan­dem­ic” began last Tues­day, and its lec­tures, which you’ll find uploaded to this Youtube playlist, will con­tin­ue week­ly until Decem­ber 8th. Even if you have no back­ground in med­i­cine, biol­o­gy, or sci­ence of any kind, don’t be intim­i­dat­ed: as lead­ing pro­fes­sors Richard Young and Facun­do Batista empha­size, this course is meant as an intro­duc­to­ry overview.

And as Bruce Walk­er’s first lec­ture demon­strates, it’s not just open to the gen­er­al pub­lic but geared toward the under­stand­ing and con­cerns of the gen­er­al pub­lic as well. Tak­ing it may not reas­sure you that an end to the pan­dem­ic lies just around the cor­ner, but it will give you clear­er and more coher­ent ways to think about what’s going on. The virus and dis­ease involved are still incom­plete­ly under­stood, after all — but thanks to these and oth­er researchers around the world, get­ting bet­ter under­stood every day.

“COVID-19, SARS-CoV­‑2 and the Pan­dem­ic” will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Watch “Coro­n­avirus Out­break: What You Need to Know,” and the 24-Lec­ture Course “An Intro­duc­tion to Infec­tious Dis­eases,” Both Free from The Great Cours­es

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

Why Fight­ing the Coro­n­avirus Depends on You

Use Your Time in Iso­la­tion to Learn Every­thing You’ve Always Want­ed To: Free Online Cours­es, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Col­or­ing Books & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A Medieval Metropolis Existed In What’s Now St. Louis, Then Mysteriously Disappeared in the 14th Century

in History | September 7th, 2020

In our cur­rent epoch of human his­to­ry, when pop­u­la­tions of major cities swell into the tens of mil­lions, an urban cen­ter of 30,000 peo­ple doesn’t seem very impres­sive. 1,000 years ago, a city that size was larg­er than Lon­don or Paris, and sat atop what is now East St. Louis. At its height in 1050, Annalee Newitz writes at Ars Tech­ni­ca, “it was the largest pre-Colom­bian city in what became the Unit­ed States…. Its col­or­ful wood­en homes and mon­u­ments rose along the east­ern side of the Mis­sis­sip­pi, even­tu­al­ly spread­ing across the riv­er to St. Louis.”

It is called Cahokia, but that name comes from lat­er inhab­i­tants who them­selves didn’t know who built the ancient metrop­o­lis, Roger Kaza explains, “We real­ly have no idea what the builders called their city.” Also, no one, includ­ing the peo­ple who set­tled there not long after­ward, knows what hap­pened to the city’s inhab­i­tants. Archae­ol­o­gists call these lost indige­nous soci­eties the Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans.

They occu­pied a ter­ri­to­ry along the riv­er of near­ly 1,600 hectares dur­ing what is called the Mis­sis­sip­pi­an peri­od, rough­ly between 800 and 1400 A.D. The soci­ety built mounds, “some 120,” notes UNESCO, who have des­ig­nat­ed Cahokia a world her­itage site. (See an intro­duc­to­ry video below from the Cahokia Mounds Muse­um Soci­ety and two artist recre­ations else­where on this page.) The largest of these mounds, Monk’s Mound, stands 30 meters high.

Cahokia is “a strik­ing exam­ple of a com­plex chief­dom soci­ety, with many satel­lite mound cen­tres and numer­ous out­ly­ing ham­let and vil­lages.” Size esti­mates vary. UNESCO’s is more con­ser­v­a­tive “This agri­cul­tur­al soci­ety may have had a pop­u­la­tion of 10–20,000 at its peak between 1050 and 1150,” they write—still, at any rate, a major city at the time. The Mis­sis­sip­pi­an civ­i­liza­tion left behind “pot­tery, cer­e­mo­ni­al art, games and weapons,” Kaza notes. “Their trade net­work was vast, stretch­ing from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mex­i­co.”

The mounds were a sym­bol of both earth­ly and reli­gious pow­er, and the city appears to have been a pil­grim­age site of some kind, with remains of what may have been a 5,000 square foot tem­ple at the top of Monk’s Mound and evi­dence of human sac­ri­fice on oth­er mounds. “A cir­cle of posts west of Monk’s Mound has been dubbed ‘Wood­henge,’ because the posts clear­ly mark sol­stices and equinox­es,” writes Kaza.

But the true strength of Cahokia, as in all great metrop­o­lis­es, was eco­nom­ic pow­er. As archae­ol­o­gist Tim­o­thy Pauke­tat of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois notes, “it just so hap­pens that some of the rich­est agri­cul­tur­al soils in the mid­con­ti­nent are right up against that area of Cahokia.” Corn grew plen­ti­ful­ly, pro­duced sur­plus­es, and the soci­ety grew rich. Then, seem­ing­ly inex­plic­a­bly, it col­lapsed. “By the time Euro­pean col­o­niz­ers set foot on Amer­i­can soil in the 15th cen­tu­ry, these cities were already emp­ty,”

One recent study sug­gests two nat­ur­al cli­mate change events sev­er­al hun­dred years apart explain both Cahokia’s rise and fall: “an unusu­al­ly warm peri­od called the Medieval Cli­mat­ic Anom­aly” gave rise to the region’s abun­dance, and an abrupt cool­ing peri­od called “the Lit­tle Ice Age” brought on its end. Cli­ma­tol­o­gists have found evi­dence show­ing how a drought in 1350 caused the pre-Columbian Mis­sis­sip­pi­an corn indus­try to implode.

Pauke­tat finds this expla­na­tion per­sua­sive, but insuf­fi­cient. Pol­i­tics and cul­ture played a role. It’s pos­si­ble, says arche­ol­o­gist Jere­my Wil­son, who coau­thored the recent cli­mate paper, that “the cli­mate change we have doc­u­ment­ed may have exac­er­bat­ed what was an already dete­ri­o­rat­ing sociopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion.”

Evi­dence sug­gests mount­ing con­flict and vio­lence as food grew scarcer. Cli­ma­tol­o­gist Brox­ton Bird argues that the Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans left their cities and “migrat­ed to places far­ther south and east like present-day Geor­gia,” Angus Chen writes at NPR, “where con­di­tions were less extreme. Before the end of the 14th cen­tu­ry, the archae­o­log­i­cal record sug­gests Cahokia and oth­er city-states were com­plete­ly aban­doned.”

We should be care­ful of see­ing in this con­tem­po­rary lan­guage any close par­al­lels to the sit­u­a­tion major cities face in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Just one link in the glob­al sup­ply chain that dri­ves cli­mate change today can employ 10,000–20,000 peo­ple. But per­haps it’s pos­si­ble to see, in the dis­tant indige­nous past of North Amer­i­ca, the not-so-future vision of a migra­to­ry future for the inhab­i­tants of many cities around the world.

via Art Tech­ni­ca and Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

Two Ani­mat­ed Maps Show the Expan­sion of the U.S. from the Dif­fer­ent Per­spec­tives of Set­tlers & Native Peo­ples

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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