The ancient city of Cahokia was the center of the native Mississippian culture and is today considered to be the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico. Located directly across the Mississippi River and amidst today’s agro-industrial zones of the American Bottom, it is a place where different time regimes of settlement, cultivation, ecological transformations, and cultural meanings meet.

This public symposium meshes the different temporalities present at Cahokia and its surrounding area. Archaeologists, artists, and community activists present and discuss the nexus between ancient and current modalities of dwelling in the area, and the conceptual underpinnings of studying human-environmental interactions across time and space. They will offer insights into the state-of-the-art methods used to understand the contextual relationships between humans and their environments in the Mississippi River area—including on the migration of species, diets, and land-use changes—and link these to both the current zonings of industrial and social fragmentation and their legacies for the future.

The symposium is a joint collaboration between Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), Washington University in St. Louis, Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (HKW). It will take place in convergence with the Midway Meeting of the year-long project "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River" at The Luminary, the St. Louis Anthropocene Field Campus, and the opening of Art + Landscape STL at the Granite City Art and Design District.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River is a project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in collaboration with numerous international partners. It is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the initiative #WunderbarTogether as well as by the Max Planck Society.

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