Cahokia: The Great City of Mounds That Rose, Ruled, and Vanished Before Columbus
Just across the river from where the modern city of St. Louis now stands, in the fertile bottomlands of the Mississippi, there once rose the greatest city that ever existed in North America north of Mexico. It was called, by us, Cahokia — for we do not know the name its own builders gave it. At its height, some nine hundred years ago, it was a metropolis of many thousands of people, larger in its day than London, a sprawling sacred city of enormous earthen pyramids, vast public plazas, and great timber monuments aligned to the movements of the sun. It was the capital of a powerful and sophisticated civilization, the beating heart of a culture that spread its influence across much of the continent. And then, over the course of a century or two, it emptied. Its people abandoned the great mounds and drifted away, the city fell silent, and by the time European explorers arrived, no one remained who could tell them who had built the giant pyramids or why they had been forsaken. The rise an...