09/14/2026
Thursday, September 17, 7:00 PM CT
South Suburban Chapter IAAA
"The Influence of Cahokia on Smaller, Local Communities"
with Dr. Christina Friberg, Field Museum & University of Illinois (Chicago)
Cahokia was the largest and most complex Native American city north of Mexico from 1050-1375 CE, and the epicenter of the Mississippian phenomenon that spanned and influenced Native American communities throughout the Midwest, Midsouth, and Southeastern US until the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. In this talk, Dr. Christina Friberg will discuss the broader impacts of large Mississippian-period sites like Cahokia on outlying communities and on the daily lives of people living in the Mississippian-period Illinois River Valley (IRV). The IRV is a region that fell outside of Cahokia’s direct sphere of economic influence, yet the people there built Mississippian towns, made Mississippian pottery, and engaged in Mississippian practices with reference to their own identities and traditions. The ways in which IRV Mississippians engaged with Cahokian culture varied over time and with distance from Cahokia. In order to understand variation in the nature of interactions in Cahokia’s hinterland, Dr. Friberg will address issues of identity, community organization, sociopolitical complexity, and religion by incorporating a combination of geophysical survey, excavation, geospatial analysis, and material analyses.
Dr. Christina Friberg is Assistant Curator of North American Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and specializes in the archaeology of precontact American Indian societies in the Midwest and Southeast. Her research focuses on the impacts of complex nonstate societies on outlying communities and endemic warfare on daily life.
This presentation, which is free and open to the public, will be in-person at the Marie Irwin Community Center, 18120 Highland Avenue, Homewood, IL
and also available via ZOOM. Please join us for light refreshments before the program.
Interested in participating remotely? Using the link below, send an email requesting access.* Make your request as soon as possible and include enough information to verify your identity. A day or two before the program, the host will respond with an invitation to attend via ZOOM. To ensure access to this event, please log in by 7:00 PM.
[email protected]
