Field Trip: Cahokia
Photo illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photo: Aemurray wustl, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Land Shapes People & People Shape Land
This week’s focus: Field Trip, where we highlight significant historic, archaeological, and cultural sites around the world
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1300 words, an estimated 5½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
Quite often, U.S. history is taught with an origin date in the 1500s or 1600s — the time when some Europeans settled on the land that would eventually become the United States. A popular choice is starting the narrative with Jamestown because it was the “first permanent English settlement in North America.”
While early European settlements represent undeniably important and impactful chapters of U.S. history, this is not the whole story. Thousands of years of Indigenous history, including the lives of millions of people and the cultural and technological innovations they created, are integral components of U.S. history.
For this month's theme, “Land Shapes People and People Shape Land” — and for our final newsletter during Native American Heritage Month — we’re examining the largest known ancient city in what would become the United States: the city of Cahokia.
What Was Cahokia?
Across the river valleys of what is today the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States, complex Native American societies thrived.
Often referred to as Mississippian culture, numerous Indigenous communities spread across the great Mississippi River and tributary valley system. From about 800–1600 CE, Mississippian societies were organized as chiefdoms, crafted intricate art, developed extensive trade routes and sophisticated systems of agriculture – including the Three Sisters farming method.
A distinctive aspect of Mississippian culture was their construction of earth mounds, or pyramid-like structures, built from soil and clay, that punctuated the landscape — some reaching as high as 100 feet tall. Some have estimated that there could have been as many as tens of thousands of mounds, constructed across a duration of thousands of years.
The purpose of the mounds ranged, sometimes the top level of the mound included a temple or residence for chiefs, some mounds were used as a stage to host religious ceremonies, others were burial sites.
Located in what is now southern Illinois, just miles from St. Louis, Missouri, Cahokia is considered to be the largest city of Mississippian society.
At its peak around 1100 CE, it’s estimated that Cahokia was a bustling city center that stretched across six square miles, with over 120 mounds, and up to 20,000 people — a population that would have surpassed even the city of London at that time.
What’s regularly agreed upon is that Cahokia was the biggest city to have existed in what would become the United States, and while there are many cultural and technological highlights, the architectural design of Cahokia is worth noting, especially as we consider our theme — land shapes people and people shape land.
What Was Unique About Cahokia?
Cahokia’s structures, or mounds, some of which still stand today, represent considerable innovation and accomplishment.
The largest structure of Cahokia was Monks Mound. Towering over the Mississippian floodplains, Monks Mound is the largest pyramid, or human made earthen structure, north of ancient Mesoamerica, or current-day Mexico.
Built from transported samples of local soil and clay, Monks Mound required great labor and commitment to build. It’s estimated, in this PBS Terra video, that it required over 15 million loads of earth to build Monks Mound, likely all done by hand, with people using their own bodies to lift and transport perhaps up to 50 pounds of earth, one basket at a time.
Archaeologist AJ White describes the massive scale by comparing it to the pyramids of Egypt, stating that at “775 feet wide, and 950 feet long,” Monks Mound, at its base, is “about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
Another impressive innovation of Cahokia is Woodhenge. A series of large circular formations made from red cedar posts drilled into the ground, Woodhenge would serve as a visual marker to track the solar calendar, which helped denote seasons, planting and harvesting cycles, and when to hold festivals.
Cahokia peaked around 1100 CE and fell into decline around 1250 CE.
There are numerous speculations as to why Cahokia went into decline. Some theories connect it to changes in weather, or that droughts or floods impacted the ability to grow corn.
Others paint a different story, such as a UC Berkeley study that suggests a population decline likely happened in the 1200s, but that the region also experienced a small resurgence in the 1500s, and “kept a steady presence there through the 1700s, when migrations, warfare, disease and environmental change led to a reduction in the local population.”
This perspective debunks the idea that Native Americans simply disappeared, and instead migrated and changed in response to external factors, which helps build a more complex narrative of Indigenous agency, migration, renewal, resilience, and adaptation.
How Today’s Scientific Innovation Helps Us Unearth History
Cahokia is not a fully excavated site; there are complex, nuanced parts of the story that we have yet to unearth.
In an attempt to minimize human impact, only about one percent of the grounds have been excavated in recent years.
Preservation has not always prevailed, however. Construction during preparation for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, led to the destruction of countless mounds. In the city of St. Louis, explains the Star Tribune, “landmarks dot locations where mounds once stood, including several places in Forest Park, where mounds were demolished to make way for the World's Fair in 1904. By the early 20th century, only Sugarloaf Mound [in St. Louis] remained.”
Fortunately, innovative scientific tools of today can help us expand our knowledge of Cahokia through less invasive methods, such as by using magnetometers and gradiometers.
Currently, archaeologists in Cahokia are conducting “one of the largest geophysical surveys that’s ever been done in the world” using tools that are similar to the function of x-rays, which have the goal of “peering beneath the ground without doing any destructive or invasive excavation.”
One tool being used are magnetometers. As described by archaeologist Tim Horsley, magnetometers “measure very subtle disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field.” A sample of burned soil, for example, is more magnetic than other samples of earth, and would read differently with this machine, as would large samples of soil that have been moved to new locations. With this data, it’s been deduced that Cahokia had “urban planning,” featuring large neighborhoods, plazas, and farms.
Another tool being utilized at Cahokia are gradiometers, or instruments used to “detect holes where posts once stood.” Using gradiometers, archaeologist Timothy Pauketat and others have mapped the site of a large Woodhenge in Cahokia.
Such data reveals that the land of Cahokia was shaped with purpose, and that purpose aligned with deep scientific knowledge.
Past, Present, and Future Lens
Learning about Cahokia is one way to expand the more limited narrative for U.S. history, and provides us with frameworks to consider our collective future.
Dr. Jean Dennison, of Osage Nation, notes the importance of a future-oriented lens when learning about the history of places like Cahokia: “We can take the values and the many, many lessons [including feats of engineering and Indigenous science] that our communities learned through time and place to help build the strongest future possible for ourselves.”
Eddy Red Eagle, Jr., from Osage Nation, describes how — through the long process it required to build places like Cahokia — the people of Mississippian culture long ago interacted with land in a way that deeply considered the future: “We come from people that built that. What people would spend decades, by hand, and accumulate the mass for Monks Mound? Who would do that? It’s a prayer, and that’s what Osages woke up with every day, and they went to retire at the end of the day in prayer.” In this perspective, Cahokia is a commitment, an ode to future generations.
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