Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- In modern-day Missouri, you can find towering mounds of earth that were once the product of a vast North American culture.
- Cahokia was the largest city built by this native American civilization.
- Because the Mississippians who built Cahokia didn’t have a writing system, little is known of their culture Archaeological evidence, however, hints at a fascinating society.
Mesopotamia had Ur, a wealthy city from 2100 BC and a towering ziggurat. Egypt had (and still has) Memphis and Alexandria, with their great pyramids and library, respectively. The Toltecs or Totonacs had Teotihuacan, which hosted over 125,000 people in its monolithic architecture.
Ancient cities seem to have sprung up all over the world, each of which must have been magnificent sights in their day. But it seems like a handful of these cities hog all the limelight. Few are familiar with North America’s great ancient city, Cahokia.
Mysterious mounds in Missouri
Wikimedia Commons
Monks Mound, the largest remaining mound in Cahokia.
Near modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, 80 mounds of earth dot 2,200 acres of land, the largest of which covers 13.8 acres and rises 100 feet high. These 80 mounds are the remainders of 120 mounds built 1,000 years before Columbus reached North American by a forgotten people called the Mississippians, named after the great river they lived near. All told, the mounds would have required the excavation of about 55 million cubic feet of earth.
The Mississippian civilization is poorly understood; they had no writing system, and by the time Europeans bothered to seriously document their culture, they had been scattered, wiped out by European diseases they had no immunities to.
Instead, much of our understanding of the Mississippians has come from archaeology, and the city of Cahokia represents the greatest trove of archaeological evidence. The city was named after the Cahokia tribe that lived in the area when the French first arrived, though they were not its original inhabitants. In fact, by that time in the 17th century, Cahokia was abandoned.
Though the Mississippians had no writing system, Cahokia was clearly the product of some kind of centralized planning. Its many great mounds are a testament to that as well as the 50-acre leveled plain…
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