Climate change and environment in Cahokia’s history

Archaeologists, particularly in the Southeast, have often looked to the environment and climate change to understand the evolution of past societies, especially places like the city of Cahokia. Despite calls to provide more holistic interpretations of places like Cahokia, agency, history, and practice are frequently relegated to the background and environmental processes are elevated as primary causal factors precipitating cultural change. In this article, we consider environment and climate change at Cahokia from a relational perspective, drawing from Indigenous philosophies of locality, place-thought, kinship, and reciprocity, to provide an avenue for more nuanced understanding of how people negotiated their relationships with the inhabited world, including how climate and environment might have been interpreted as embedded within and stemming from those relationships.