The largest earthen mound in North America, an aerial view of Monk's Mound at Cahokia. Indeed, Henry Brackenridge, the first person to document the site in detail, was reminded of those other timeworn structures. This 10-story behemoth has a larger base than the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico. Its centerpiece was a 50-acre public plaza (the size of almost 40 football fields) and beside it sat the largest mound in North America, known today as Monks Mound. In its heyday, the population was about 15,000, with tens of thousands more spread throughout the surrounding suburbs.Ĭahokia, the apogee of the Mississippian culture, consisted of more than 120 massive dirt mounds. 800 to 1350, sprawled across 5 square miles and rivaled the European cities of its age. “Metropolis” is no frivolous description of Cahokia - this city, which flourished from about A.D. Louis, a network of artificial hills rises from the floodplain of the Mississippi River, marking what was once the heart of an ancient mound-building civilization. “Our understanding of American urban history,” wrote historians Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven Hunt Corey, “is enriched when we consider in detail the story of populous Native American settlements.” Cahokia: A Metropolis of MoundsĮight miles east of St. Taken together, these overlooked sites dispel the notion that Europeans discovered a land devoid of progress. Around the same time, in the remote New Mexico desert, thousands of Puebloans bustled about the engineering marvel that is Chaco Canyon. Most significantly, in southern Illinois, the Mississippian city of Cahokia likely boasted a larger population than London around the year 1000. In reality, this continent had its own political and cultural hubs - not as many, perhaps, but far from none. “‘Civilization’ is not a word typically associated with ancient North America,” the archaeologist Timothy Pauketat wrote in the opening line of a book that goes on to refute that misconception. The standard portrayal of pre-Colombian North America (at least north of Mexico) is a vast, unspoiled world speckled with small-scale villages that pale in comparison to the majestic pyramids and ruins of the Aztec, Maya and Inca.
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