The Mississippians at Cahokia
When Europeans began to explore the Mississippi basin, they met many Native American peoples. Most were living in small scattered communities that were often mainly self-sufficient.
As they came down the Mississippi in their canoes, and opposite where St Louis now stands, they may well have seen groups of isolated hills close to the river. They may have climbed to the top of some of these hills and used them to survey the flat lands around.
Perhaps they just took these hills – or mounds as we now call them – for granted, but perhaps they wondered why there were hills in an area that is otherwise flat.
For centuries no one guessed that they represented the gigantic remains of a civilisation that occupied this area of southwestern Illinois for at least three centuries beginning 1100 years ago. They were an incredibly organised civilization who built enormous cities, not too different from those being built by the Maya and others in meso america.
The difference was the people of Cahokia built their mounds of soil and rubble rather than fashioned stones because this was a floodplain region. So while the stone pyramids of the Maya remained for everyone to wonder at, the Cahokia mounds gently faded into the landscape.
Now we see the Cahokia Mounds as one of the wonders of the ancient world. In the preserved historic park of 2,200 acres, some 3.5 square miles, there are 80 mounds.
But we now also know that these mounds were special ceremonial areas that were located in the core of the city-state of the Mississippian culture of which they were an important part. We know that most people lived in small mud brick and thatch huts that have long ago disappeared, but which covered an incredible 6 square miles – about a tenth the size of modern St Louis.
We also know that at this time more people probably lived at Cahokia than live in medieval Europe.
The Mississippian people began to develop into a civilization about 1000 years before Europeans came to the Americas.
The first Mississippians made this there home about 600AD, but the society really began to flourish by the 9th century.
Over the centuries they built the largest prehistoric earthen structures in the Americas north of Mexico.
Were they just living alone? Artifacts recovered from the site tell us otherwise. In fact their site at the junction of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers and near to the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers as well as the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, allowed them to canoe across much of the entire Mississippi basin, reaching as far as the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. They traded copper, chert (locally sourced flint for arrowheads and axes), and even decorative whelk shells.
Everything they did to make these mounds required thousands of hours of toil by many people. Just as the Pyramids of Egypt were built in the reigns of just three pharaohs in less than a century, so the Mississippians for some reason began to build their mounds in an equally frantic way over just a few decades, shifting 55 million cubic feet of earth.
The mounds were not placed randomly, but formed the centerpieces of large plazas. People from a wide areas most likely would have regarded these mounds as a special place worthy of pilgrimage, much as people came from all over Britain on pilgrimages to Stonehenge centuries earlier.
So this was no local development, but a site special to the whole Mississippian peoples far and wide.
Monks Mound,the largest ceremonial temple or chief's mound, covers 14 acres, rises 100 ft and was once topped by a massive 5,000 sq ft building 50 ft high. This a massive platform mound with four terraces, is the equivalent to a building 10 stories tall, making it is the largest man-made earthen mound north of Mexico. In the building on top may have been the palace of the paramount chief of the city, visible for miles around.
To the south of Monks Mound is the Grand Plaza, a large area that covers roughly 50 acres. To make this they turned the natural ridges and dips of the Mississippi floodplain into a flat area, yet another massive undertaking. The central district of Cahokia was also surrounded by a 2-mi-long wooden wall, thus fortifying the inner core from attackers.
And then the Mississippians vanished, for a reason we do not understand. They mounds and cities had been abandoned for three centuries before the first Europeans arrived. Over the time when they were at their peak, the world was a warmer and wetter place, making it easier to grow crops and support a large population. Farther south, in the SW canyon lands, a similar blossoming of civilization was also happening, and giving rise to the Mesa Verde peoples and others.
But then the weather got cooler. There were also many severe floods. This was the time of the Little Ice Age, and the Mississippians may have been unable to continue to grow enough food for a big city, and like the peoples of the SW they may have been forced to leave.
Cahokia, before it was abandoned, was larger than any city in the United States until the 1780s, when Philadelphia's population grew beyond 40,000. And yet - until recently, no inkling of this great civilisation was even suspected.
