Cahokia planned a city of 22,400 on the Mississippi floodplain
From the late tenth to the sixteenth century, Mississippian cultures raised maize-fed chiefdoms across the Southern United States and Eastern Woodlands. Cahokia, founded in 1050, likely held at least 22,400 people around 1124—a planned mound metropolis of mixed Caddoan, Natchezan, Muskogean, and Dhegiha Siouan communities.
Breaks with Late Woodland life were incomplete: Eastern Agricultural Complex crops persisted beside maize, and platform mounds had earlier precedents. Between 1050 and 1150 Cahokians projected influence outward; afterward perhaps half the residents left toward Nashville (likely ancestral Koasati) peaking around 1275, with further movements to Angel and Etowah.
Late Mississippian times (1400–1600) favoured larger but less elaborate paramount chiefdom confederations rather than single dominant centres. European contact then shattered the pattern into the colonial shatter zone. An Emergent Mississippian phase, roughly 900 to 1000, overlaps with the last stretch of the Late Woodland, an era that had already adopted new bow technology.
The roots ran back through Woodland groups, from whom Mississippians inherited the Hopewell clan system and units of measurement, even reusing some older mound centres. Cahokia itself, stretching from its downtown near Collinsville into an East St. Louis precinct, reached its height around 1124. Between 1050 and 1100 it planted short-lived outposts as far as 900 kilometres north, such as Trempealeau Mounds and Aztalan, and late in the 11th century pushed south to places like the Carson Mounds, probably a Cahokian exclave. It was not the only seed, though: Shiloh and other southeastern centres arose independently. As Cahokia's grip loosened, a multipolar Middle Mississippian world took shape in which the chiefdom of Itaba, ruled from Etowah, raised the tallest temple mound after Cahokia, while Caddoan peoples in the west built Spiro and other mound sites of their own.
Source: Mississippian period (archaeology)
