Just across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis stood one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. No one knows the name of the settlement that rose on what is now called Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois. All we know is that a sophisticated civilization flourished here, long before Europeans came to North America. At its peak in 1250 CE, Cahokia was bigger than London.
Like the Maya, the architects of Cahokia built huge flat-topped temples. Where the Maya pyramids are made of stone, the mounds at Cahokia are made of earth. They include Monk’s Mound (named for Trappist monks who farmed its terraces in the nineteenth century), one of the largest pyramids in the world. It’s been estimated that Monks Mound comprises 15 million baskets of earth, carried by human labor.
In front of Monk’s Mound was the grand plaza—a fifty-acre communal space for markets, ceremonies, and a game called chunkey, which involved throwing spears at rolling stone discs. To the east of Monk’s Mound was a huge solar calendar, now called Woodhenge. It used a circle of cedar posts, each twenty feet tall and painted red, to track solstices, equinoxes, and other important dates in the agricultural cycle.
J & P Voelkel at Cahokia Mounds, June 2013
Cahokia gained its power partly from its location on the fertile floodplain of the Mississippi near the confluence of the Missouri and Illinois rivers. It grew maize on an industrial scale and its trade links reached as far as the Gulf of Mexico. To protect their wealth, its rulers surrounded their city center with a twenty-foot-high stockade wall.
Who were these rulers? We still don’t know. But in one of the smaller mounds, the remains of an important man were discovered. The archaeologists called him “The Birdman” because his skeleton lay on 20,000 shell beads arranged in the shape of a bird. Also in the mound were 250 human sacrificial victims. Although Cahokia had fallen by the time Europeans arrived (and they mistook its grass-covered mounds for hill formations), it can be surmised from their accounts of other Mississippian settlements that the ruler of Cahokia was called Great Sun.
