Scholars continue to debate the relative importance of ecological and social factors in Cahokia’s collapse, just as they argue about whether or not it should be considered a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’.45 In our own terms (as set out in the last chapter), what we appear to have in Cahokia is a second-order regime in which two of our three elementary forms of domination – in this case, control over violence and charismatic politics – came together in a powerful, even explosive cocktail.
