Artist’s recreation of downtown Cahokia, with Monk’s Mound at its center.
Ars Technica takes a fascinating look at the unearthing of a long ago lost city.
A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region’s tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.
At the city’s apex in 1100, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, bigger than London or Paris at the time. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose along the eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading across the river to St. Louis. One particularly magnificent structure, known today as Monk’s Mound, marked the center of downtown. It towered 30 meters over an enormous central plaza and had three dramatic ascending levels, each covered in ceremonial buildings. Standing on the highest level, a person speaking loudly could be heard all the way across the Grand Plaza below. Flanking Monk’s Mound to the west was a circle of tall wooden poles, dubbed Woodhenge, that marked the solstices.
Despite its greatness, the city’s name has been lost to time. Its culture is known simply as Mississippian. When Europeans explored Illinois in the 17th century, the city had been abandoned for hundreds of years. At that time, the region was inhabited by the Cahokia, a tribe from the Illinois Confederation. Europeans decided to name the ancient city after them, despite the fact that the Cahokia themselves claimed no connection to it.
Centuries later, Cahokia’s meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery. It was booming in 1050, and by 1400 its population had disappeared, leaving behind a landscape completely geoengineered by human hands. Looking for clues about its history, archaeologists dig through the thick, wet, stubborn clay that Cahokians once used to construct their mounds. Buried beneath just a few feet of earth are millennia-old building foundations, trash pits, the cryptic remains of public rituals, and in some places, even, graves.
To find out what happened to Cahokia, I joined an archaeological dig there in July.
If time travel were possible, I want to go back to see one of these ancient American cities. Their structure seems so different from the usual euro-centric presentation of the Middle Ages and what villages and cities were supposed to look like, I want to go and see how things worked in such a city: how did people move or travel around the city, how were their habits defined or confined by the structure of the city, what was it like to have that giant centrepiece mound towering over everything (similar to but not the same, I suppose, as a cathedral tower…), what would it feel like to hear some speaking over the plaza from the top of the mound, how did the city divide into neighbourhoods (good, bad, wealthy, poor, or maybe some completely different set of descriptors…), etc.
Thanks for this article, this is awesome.
With that at the date of demise, the first thing to mind is the Little Ice Age.
When my kids were little, I went in for trying to get a broader understanding of the world, history in particular, than my education had delivered (roughly how I became an atheist). I remember discovering the existence of Cahokia and really wanting to see it. Finally got to a few years ago. Aztalan, which seems to be a northern outlier of the same culture, is not far from us and we happened across the Etowah site in Georgia a couple summers back. I’ve always wondered what the relationship was between the Cahokia culture and the various Central American temple mound builders.