North America’s greatest earthen city rose opposite St. Louis
Cahokia Mounds mark a Native American city that flourished about 1050–1350 CE across the Mississippi from today’s St. Louis, in southwestern Illinois. It was the largest Mississippian urban centre, and its earthworks remain the biggest pre-Columbian constructions north of Mexico.
Nobody knows what its builders called the city. French explorers who met the Cahokia, a subgroup of the Illiniwek, centuries after it was abandoned attached that tribe’s name to the ruins. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark and one of twenty-six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States, run as a state archaeology park.
There are signs of people nearby in the Late Archaic, around 1200 BCE, but Cahokia as defined today was settled about 600 CE in the Late Woodland period, and mound building began with the emerging Mississippian culture in the ninth century. The inhabitants left no writing beyond symbols on pottery, shell, copper, wood and stone, yet the planned layout, a woodhenge, mounds and burials reveal a sophisticated society.
Before 1000 CE people in the American Bottom lived in hamlets of 50 to 100 that lasted only five to ten years. Over time settlements were laid out along cosmic principles emphasising the cardinal directions, and by the late tenth century they merged into larger villages. A dense community covering 35 to 70 hectares grew at Cahokia itself in the late 900s, when a few thousand people lived in the region. They farmed mainly crops of the older Eastern Agricultural Complex, with maize taking hold only around 900 CE.
Cahokia then became the leading centre of Mississippian culture, whose towns lined major waterways across the Midwest, East and South-east. Its position near where the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers meet let it trade with the Great Lakes and the Gulf Coast for goods such as copper, shark teeth, lightning whelk shells and chert from Mill Creek.
Source: Cahokia
