A climber ascending the worn slope of the great pyramid sees the river plain slowly stretching out to the horizon. The top of the pyramid soars a hundred feet in the air, the equivalent of a ten-story building, and provides the highest viewpoint on the plain. Unlike the pointed top of the Egyptian pyramid, this truncated pyramid is capped by a massive field large enough to host a football game.
On each side of the pyramid, lumps in the earth mark the sites of smaller pyramids, burial mounds, large open plazas, or perhaps markets and other buildings that surrounded the main pyramid. Faint traces remain visible in the soil showing the line of a stockade that surrounded the entire ceremonial complex.
With more than twenty thousand residents, Cahokia was the largest city in America north of ancient Mexico. During its most prosperous period, around A.D. 1250, Cahokia was larger than London and ranked as one of the great urban centers of the world. Even the colonial cities founded by European settlers across North America did not surpass ancient Cahokia’s population until the eighteenth century, when Philadelphia grew to twenty thousand inhabitants.
From the top of the great pyramid at Cahokia, one can see the river to the east, just beyond which loom modern skyscrapers surrounded by residential areas. Gleaming on the distant bank of the river rises the great arch of St. Louis, which seems small and barely visible from the top of the Cahokia pyramid.
Cahokia lies in southern Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. Of all the great pyramids built in the world—in Egypt, Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru—this is the most northerly. Cahokia and the other earthen pyramids of the United States are the world’s only pyramids built in a temperate zone.
Climbing any of the world’s great pyramids is much the same experience. The climbers mostly watch their feet and the immediate area, searching for the next firm foothold. On some pyramids, such as those of Egypt, it is a little harder because the pyramid was not made for climbing. On others, such as at Cahokia, or at Teotihuacàn in Mexico, the climb is a little easier because the pyramid comes equipped with stairs or ramps for that purpose. What varies from one pyramid to the next is not the climb to the top, but what the climber sees from the top.
From the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara in Egypt, the climber sees only desert for a thousand miles to the west; to the east lies a glimpse of the green Nile and its narrow band of cultivated fields. The desert usually beckons open and clear, while the nearby inhabited areas choke in a cloud of dust, diesel smoke, and noxious gases that obscure the view of the city. From the pyramids at Meroe, built during the first millennium before Christ in the ancient kingdom of Kush, along the middle Nile in the modern Sudan, one sees only the ruddy stones and sand of a desert that stretches out like a rusting landscape of taconite ore.
The pyramids of Teotihuacàn look out over low scrub and small houses of the central Mexican highlands; approximately a mile above sea level, they were built at the highest altitude of any pyramids in the world. From atop the pyramids of Chichén Itzà and Uxmal in the Mexican Yucatàn, one sees a low-lying jungle that looks almost like a carpet unrolled over the earth.
The most spectacular pyramid view must be that from the tops of the steep pyramids of Tikal in Guatemala. The pyramids poke up above the surrounding jungle like the heads of turtles looking out over a green ocean. Only the great pyramids of Tikal qualify as truly jungle pyramids. Monkeys screech and play in the branches adjacent to the pyramid as well as on the pyramids themselves. Iridescent green turkeys strut noisily around the lower levels of the pyramid. The pyramid seems to be less a human artifact than a part of nature itself.
Cahokia does not occupy a monumental setting today. The largest pyramid in the United States sits adjacent to the horseradish capital of the world, Collinsville, Illinois. It occupies an unincorporated urban niche, a virtual no-man’s-land tucked between the cities of St. Louis, Collinsville, and East St. Louis. Collinsville Road, which cuts across the foot of the Cahokia mound, long ago became a night strip of honkytonks. Cheap motels sprang up around nightclubs and liquor stores that took advantage of the more liberal Illinois laws to cater to the nocturnal appetites of the greater St. Louis urban area, directly across the Mississippi River in Missouri. A drive-in theater moved onto the flattened ground around the Cahokia mound. Within a few miles, entrepreneurs erected the Fairmount Park racetrack for horses and the St. Louis International Speedway for cars.
Today, even the seedy night strip has deteriorated. One motel still advertises rooms for eight dollars a night, but many of the buildings have been cleared away. They have given way to the next stage in urban blight, an even less dramatic collection of salvage yards and treatment plants.
In the summer, the thick leaves of the trees obscure much of the view from the top of Cahokia mound, but when the leaves drop in the cool fall air, the surrounding area comes more clearly into focus. An asphalt and cement company on the eastern edge of the site often fills the air with the strong smells of asphalt and petroleum. The pond behind it hosts a collection of old tires, chunks of cement, and discarded industrial junk.
Across the street a battered cinder-block nightclub without windows now has become a discount butcher outlet surrounded by hand-lettered signs:
TURKEY WINGS OR NECKS—5 LBS.—$2.49
RHIND-ON SLAB BACON—99¢
Close by the butcher shop lies a dump for some two hundred rusting hulks of wrecked and worn-out city buses with broken windows and dented sides. The buses lie pell-mell around the site like butchered dinosaurs that have been skinned and left where they fell in some bizarre hunting ritual.
Monk’s Mound, the largest of the Cahokia pyramids, covers 16 acres; it rests on a base 1,037 feet long and 790 feet wide, with a total volume of approximately 21,690,000 cubic feet, a base and total volume greater than that of the pyramid of Khufu (or Cheops), the largest in Egypt. The pyramid of Khufu is 756 feet on each side (an area of 571,536 square feet), but the base of the Cahokia pyramid is nearly 250,000 square feet larger than the Egyptian pyramid. In all the world, only the pyramids at Cholula and Teotihucàn in central Mexico surpass the Cahokia pyramid in size and total volume. No other structure in the United States approached the size of the Cahokia pyramid until the building of airplane hangars, the Pentagon, and skyscrapers in the twentieth century.
The top of Monk’s Mound served as the place for now-unknown ancient rituals and as the home of a chief or priest, but it was clearly an uncomfortable place to live. In the summer the sun shines directly onto the top of the mound without the mitigating effects of trees or hills. Standing on top of the pyramid in August is like standing in the middle of a large, desolate parking lot. The wind merely redistributes the stifling heat without offering relief. At the end of a long, hot day, storm clouds frequently blow overhead and cast giant shadows across the pyramids like rapidly moving ink blots.
In the cooler months, icy winds swoop down from the north and blast the top of the mound. Nothing stands between the top of the mound and the Arctic but the long, flat plains of the North American interior. Thick air from the Gulf of Mexico brings enough moisture to make the area around Cahokia very humid, but it does not bring enough tropical warmth to defeat the winter cold. Only a few minutes in that wind can leave one with an earache, a runny nose, and small particles of ice dangling from eyelashes and hair ends.
The ruins of approximately 45 smaller pyramids and burial mounds still stand clustered around Monk’s Mound; these alone survive from the 120 originally constructed by the Indians. For decades, European-American settlers used the mounds as quarries for dirt, and obliterated 75 of them. Farmers slowly cut down the pyramids through repeated years of tilling the soil. Especially the horseradish farmers have loosened and damaged the archaeological remains by cutting into the earth the eighteen inches that they need for their deep-root crop.
Despite the losses and degradation of the site, Cahokia still ranks as the largest collection of pyramids ever constructed in one place anywhere in the world. In addition to Cahokia, ten other large urban areas occupied this stretch of the Mississippi River, and scattered between them were another fifty smaller villages (Fowler).* The present city of St. Louis now occupies the site of one such suburb of ancient Cahokia. The white settlers of St. Louis nicknamed their settlement “Mound City” in recognition of the twenty-six Indian mounds they found there, but those mounds have since been cleared away to make room for the modern city.
Little is known about the people who made this city. Even the name Cahokia comes from the name of the Indians living in the area when the French arrived in the eighteenth century. For lack of a more accurate name, anthropologists generally call the people who built it “Mississippian,” and the site of Cahokia is in a twenty-five-mile stretch of the river called “American Bottom” in anthropological literature. The name of the largest pyramid, Monk’s Mound, derives not from ancient Indian priests who lived on it, but from Christians, namely the Trappist monks who owned it and farmed it in the nineteenth century.
The city plan of Cahokia closely followed a common pattern of urban Mississippian sites, but Cahokia achieved a scale that surpassed all others. A collection of temple pyramids, mounds for chiefs’ houses, and burial mounds bordered an open, rectangular plaza that was probably used for religious and civic ceremonies as well as athletic events and markets. The cities and towns that we now call Mississippian were concentrated along the Mississippi, Ohio, and Arkansas Rivers in the central part of the United States and across the entire width of the Southeastern United States from St. John’s River along the Atlantic Coast of Florida and Ocmulgee in the uplands of Georgia to Spiro, Oklahoma.
Archaeological investigations reveal that settlement began between A.D. 600 and 800 at Cahokia and grew steadily to its greatest size a few centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. The city started before the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire and persisted through the time of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe.
In the 1960s, archaeologists made an unexpected discovery when a freeway was about to be built within a half-mile of Monk’s Mound. They found a large circle that had once consisted of a series of large poles, which they named Woodhenge after its similarity to England’s Stonehenge. The ancient Cahokians erected Woodhenge about A.D. 1000. The circle measures 410 feet in diameter, with the largest post in the center. The structure apparently served as a giant solar calendar for determining the solstices and equinoxes of the year, important information for an agricultural civilization.
The origins of the Mississippian culture coincide with the introduction of the hoe, which replaced the smaller digging stick in the eighth century (Fowler), and with the introduction of new types of maize from Mexico around the tenth century, and it seems to have been steadily reinforced by the introduction of new types of beans and the domestication of native plants. A great variety of squashes, maize, and beans formed the “three sisters” that typified agriculture throughout North America. Indian cooks knew how to make virtually every corn dish that we know today, including corn on the cob, hominy grits, stew, and cornmeal. They also grew pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes, nuts, persimmons, sunflowers, marsh elder, and a number of seed plants that now grow wild in the Mississippi area.
Even though today we do not know who the people were who founded Cahokia, we can easily imagine why they located it where they did; it was a transportation, trade, and communications hub, the evidence and noise of which still deafens visitors. From atop Monk’s Mound today, one can hardly escape the noise of the surrounding area. Planes fly overhead, going into and out of St. Louis International Airport. Automobile traffic on Collinsville Road seems reasonably light between rush hours, but the trains that crisscross it frequently stop the cars until they form queues even longer than the passing trains. The trains connect the city north to Chicago, south to New Orleans, and east and west to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Barges churn up and down the Mississippi River, but the constant whine of cars on the adjacent freeways drowns out the comparatively silent engines of even the largest chain of barges. No matter in which direction one looks from the top of Monk’s Mound, one sees a freeway. Three cross-country freeways and a major urban loop intersect, leaving Cahokia marooned on an island in the middle of them. Interstate 55 passes Cahokia on its path from Chicago to New Orleans; Interstate 70 joins it there in its run from Pennsylvania to Denver and out into the middle of Utah. Interstate 64 terminates there after starting at Norfolk, Virigina. Interstate 255 circles the site as part of the outer loop around the greater St. Louis area.
Ancient Cahokia arose where it did for much the same reason that St. Louis arose, because both straddle a major nexus on the Mississippi River, halfway between its origins in Minnesota and its effluence from Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. Cahokia sits at the continental hub of North America. It was an ideal place for trade, commerce, and communication.
Whether measured by length, width, volume of water, or size of the total area drained, the Mississippi River ranks as one of the great rivers of the world. Its tributaries, including the Missouri, Arkansas, and Ohio, would be major rivers in their own right if they stood alone in another part of the world. With a length of 3,740 miles, the Mississippi-Missouri system is the fourth-longest river, since it is a few hundred miles shorter than the Nile, Amazon, and Yangtze. But if we examine the total drainage area, only the Amazon and the Congo surpass the 1,255,000 square miles drained by the Mississippi system. This dwarfs the 733,400 square miles of the Nile system or the 454,000 square miles of the Yangtze. The Mississippi and its tributaries drain an area equal in size to India, or more than one and a quarter times the size of the Mediterranean Sea.
The builders of Cahokia selected their city just to the south of where the Missouri and Illinois rivers empty into the Mississippi and to the north of where the Meramec River drains into the Mississippi from the Ozark Mountains. Only 150 miles south of Cahokia, the Ohio joins the Mississippi at Cairo, where the modern states of Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri converge. Virtually no other spot on this planet can claim a more favorable location for long-distance travel by river in every direction.
Travelers along the waterways of the Mississippi can reach the southern areas of what are now Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces in Canada. They could reach Montana and Idaho in the northwest, or New Mexico in the southwest. Toward the east, the Ohio and Tennessee rivers lead to the edge of the Appalachian Mountains and the borders of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. In addition to this massive area drained by the rivers, the Mississippi and several of its tributaries reach within only a few miles of the Great Lakes, providing easy access into the largest freshwater lakes in the world, and from there into the St. Lawrence River system, the next largest in North America.
At its southern terminus, the river spills into the Gulf of Mexico, which is virtually an inland sea surrounded by land on all sides except where it opens into the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea with a line of islands stretching across the open water between the peninsulas of the Yucatàn and Florida. In the midst of all this stood Cahokia, at the center of a water network stretching effectively from the Carribbean to Hudson Bay and uniting peoples with vastly different cultures, economies, and languages.
Even though we have no ancient writing from the city of Cahokia, no carved friezes, no illustrated manuscripts or records, we do know, from the trade items found in their burials, that the citizens of Cahokia utilized the full diversity of this area through trade. Archaeologists have found rolled sheets of copper imported from the Great Lakes, arrowheads made from the black chert of Oklahoma and Arkansas, ornamental cutouts of mica from North Carolina, worked shells from the Gulf of Mexico, salt from southern Illinois, lead from northern Illinois, and worked stone from around what is now Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming (Fowler). Cahokia itself probably controlled the entry into this network of chert deposits that were mined extensively in nearby quarries and controlled a major source of salt.
Cahokia united a trading empire larger than the combined area of France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Greece, Denmark, Romania, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Luxembourg, and Bulgaria. Its trade stretched along routes longer than from London to Constantinople, from Madrid to Moscow, or from Paris to Cairo. We have no evidence that Cahokia controlled a political empire, but it certainly controlled the nexus of a trade empire that surpassed in geographic size the empires of ancient Rome and Egypt.
Another interesting fact about Cahokia emerges when we examine the distribution of North American languages at the time of European contact. We find that Cahokia straddled the boundary of the three great language families of eastern North America. The southern Muskogean languages of the Gulf Coast, the eastern Iroquoian languages, and the western Siouan languages all converged in this area. In this regard, Cahokia may have played an important intermediary role as a channel of trade, information, and the regulation of social or political relations among these three major groups.
We know very little about the civilization of Cahokia. The Indian record was not written, and no European explorer ever saw Cahokia at its height and lived to record it. By the time the explorers arrived at Cahokia, the area had already suffered two centuries of Old World diseases that traveled overland much faster than did the European explorers. The civilization of Cahokia had already withered and died. Some evidence points to destruction from indirect contact with the whites, while other evidence indicates that with a fluctuation in climate, the focus of Mississippian culture shifted to southern sites in the Gulf states from Louisiana to Georgia.
Of the three primary cultural areas of the Americas—the Andes of South America, where the Incas flourished; Mesoamerica of the Maya and Aztecs; and the Mississippian area of North America—we know today the least about the Mississippian area. As they conquered Mexico and Peru so quickly, the Spanish conquistadores saw those civilizations at their zenith, and even though they destroyed the cultures, they recorded some information about them. We can read Spanish documents and capture a faint vision of the Mexican and Peruvian civilizations, but we have no such picture of the ancient people of Cahokia, whose very name for themselves has now been lost in the blood of conquest and the dust of colonization.
Ancient America may be thought of as a cultural continuum as well as a geographic one, from Mexico to Canada. Mexico represented the densest population organized into a sedentary civilization based primarily around agriculture, but controlled from cities that served as political, mercantile, and religious centers. The nations and empires of Mexico resembled in many respects the nations and empires of the ancient Mediterranean.
At the other end of the geographical and cultural continuum, Canada and Alaska contained a sparse population devoted almost exclusively to foraging—living by hunting, gathering, and fishing. In the far north the Inuit (Eskimo) hunted sea mammals; on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts the natives fished and gathered seafood. In the plains they hunted buffalo, and around the Great Lakes they hunted deer and fished. None of these people had cities, and most of them pursued highly mobile if not nomadic lives that precluded the accumulation of large amounts of material goods or the production of large artifacts such as buildings, bridges, and pyramids.
The area we now call the United States served as the transition zone between the foraging nations of Canada and the settled empires of Mexico. Some of the ancient peoples of what would become the United States led foraging lives much like those of their Canadian neighbors.
The modern states of New Mexico and Arizona were home to farmers whose influence spread as far east as Kansas and Texas. The peoples of the Mississippi River valley also farmed and lived in settled communities. In the Northeastern United States the peoples of New York and New England pursued an agricultural life pattern that included many aspects of their neighboring foragers.
The aboriginal peoples of one half of the United States hunted and gathered wild foods, and the peoples of the other half devoted themselves primarily to agriculture. The dividing line did not run east to west through the United States but rather ran in a diagonal from the Northeast to the Southwest. This imaginary line ran from Quebec in the Northeast to Arizona in the Southwest, or, more precisely, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in the North Atlantic to the mouth of the Colorado River in the Gulf of California. To the east or south of the line, most Indians lived by agriculture; to the north or west of the line, most lived by foraging.
The highest concentrations of people lived east and south of the line, in agricultural areas. These people and their descendants we now know as the Iroquois and Huron of the Northeast; the Algonquian tribes of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Coast; the Five Civilized Tribes of Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—most of whom were removed from the Southeast to Oklahoma; and the settled pueblo people of New Mexico and the Hopi, Papago, and Pima of Arizona.
The foraging side of the line included the Plains nations of the Dakota, Lakota, Assiniboin, Crow, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, as well as the southern nations of the Comanche, Apache, and Navajo. It also included the Cree of Canada and all the Pacific Coast people from the Aleuts of the north to the Chumash and Diegueno Indians of the southern California coast.
Cahokia lay just to the south of this diagonal line that separated foraging peoples from agricultural peoples. By growing corn and other crops from Mexico, the people of ancient Cahokia established at least an indirect connection with the Maya and Aztecs of the south. By trading for minerals and metals from the north, the ancient Cahokians maintained a similar tie with the nomadic tribes. Cahokia stood at the hub of these two important and strikingly different cultures and modes of life.
Anyone who digs into the substructure of St. Louis will discover Cahokia, just as anyone who digs in any city of North America will find some stratum of Indian life. The foundations of modern North America rest firmly on a solid bed of ancient civilization. This past deserves our attention not merely for the sake of antiquarian curiosity, but because our culture and society today descend from ancient Cahokia as much as from medieval London, Renaissance Rome, and ancient Athens.
When the European adventurers and settlers explored North America, they did not find monuments of antiquity awaiting them such as existed in the Old World. North America offered no great Coliseum, no Parthenon, no Tower of London, no Louvre, no Temple of Jerusalem, no Great Wall as in China. They found no giant statues of men dotting the landscape, and no monuments to great conquerors. North American history did not speak to them; the continent seemed silent.
The settlers coming into America believed that the land contained no civilization, so they steadfastly saw none. Alexis de Tocqueville, representing the common European view, erred egregiously when he wrote in his Democracy in America that “North America was inhabited only by wandering tribes, who had no thought of profiting by the natural riches of the soil; that vast country was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a desert land awaiting its inhabitants.” For him the Indians had merely “occupied without possessing” America. They were prevented from developing a civilization by their “implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more, perhaps, their savage virtues.”
The continent did not speak to the newcomers because the civilizations of North America did not always speak in loud stone. They spoke in earth and wood, in fiber and textile, in bead and shell. Even when they did choose to speak in stone, they selected small images that could be carved from softer stone, such as the carved animal pipes of the ancient Hopewell people, or the polished red pipestone of the Plains. Even the stone buildings at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico or Mesa Verde in Colorado spoke in a softer tone, without triumphant arches, expansive domes, soaring pillars, or other modes of imperial adornment and ostentation.
The ancient people of North America built civilizations that only now we begin to see, but that we still do not understand. North America is the land of great and mysterious civilizations whose roots grow deep into the soil; yet, compared to the other continents of the world, America is still the great enigma. When Columbus arrived in the New World, he thought that he was off the coast of India or Japan or China. After four voyages and a decade exploring the Caribbean, he still could not see where he was; he insisted that he was in Asia.
Even though today we no longer share Columbus’s folly of thinking that we are in Asia, we still do not adequately know where we are. We have built cities and cleared farms across the continent, but we do not know the story of the land on which we live. We take nourishment from this soil, but because we cannot see our roots down deep in the American dirt, we do not know the source of that nourishment.
Our cultural roots as a modern people lie buried in Cahokia and a thousand similar historical sites and surviving Indian reservations across the continent. These ancient and often ignored roots still nourish our modern society, political life, economy, art, agriculture, language, and distinctly American modes of thought.
* Names in parentheses refer to works listed in the bibliography.