Heather Tomlin

11am class

Cahokia Mounds

At a time when Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages and crusaders fought holy wars to

gain Jerusalem for the Church, a Native American culture thrived in what is now the Midwest

and Southeast United States. These Native Americans are known today as the Mississippian

Mound-builders. The Mississippian Culture began from around 700 A.D. to 1400 A.D. For more

than half a millennium, the Mississippian people successfully cultivated vast agricultural

settlements based on corn, squash and beans. However, the Mississippians were much more than

prosperous farmers. They also developed a complex and highly organized culture based on a

ritual and ceremony.

Cahokia was populated by an estimated 10-20,000 people. These people lived in simple one-

family homes, which in groups formed compounds, and several compounds made up communal

plazas that were much like neighborhoods. In the center of Cahokia was Monks mound, named

after the colony of trapper monks who tried to colonize atop the mound. Monks mound , the

largest of the 120 mounds is 14 acres at the base and rises 100 feet in height, it is the “largest

pre-historic earthen structure in the New World”, it took over 19 million hours of labor to

complete, and it was done all by hand. The 22 million cubic feet of dirt it took to form the

mound, was deposited in stages from about 900 to 1200 A.D... Monks mound was probably used

for governing, ceremonies, and for the Mississippians leaders’ living spaces and burial plots.

Around this “Grand Plaza”, was a stockade built of 20,000 logs for protection. Special

buildings were also included in the Cahokian compounds and communal plazas. Each had
buildings for the storage and cooking of food, meeting houses, and steam lodges for spiritual and

physical cleansing. Monks mound also had smaller settlements which surrounded it. These

smaller communities also made up of mounds. Large amounts of goods made of foreign

resources were found at the Cahokia site. Examples of this include, copper from Lake Superior,

mica from the East, and shells from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Also, as well as there being

imported products in Cahokia, there are also Cahokian products and imitations of Cahokian

products found on Native American sites all over the United States, which lets us know the

cahokians were trading with other Native American communities from all over the United States.

An additional type of architecture found in Cahokia is remnants called “wood henge”.

Labeled for a likeness to England’s Stone-henge, the wood henge are several circles with

different diameters of hundreds of feet and are made up of posts at regular intervals. What is so

amazing about them is that the number of posts in each circle is in multiples of 12 (24, 36, 48,

60, and 72). It is believed that the posts marked lunar cycles and other celestial arrangements.

Another mound in Cahokia, simply called Mound 72, was designed by the Cahokians so that

one end of it faced the rising sun of the winter solstice, and the opposite end faced toward the

setting sun of the summer solstice. In this mound archaeologists found the remains of a man in

his 40s who was probably an important Cahokian ruler. The man was buried on a bed of more

than twenty thousand marine-shell disc beads arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the bird's

head appearing beneath the man's head and its wings and tail beneath his arms and legs. The

falcon warrior or "birdman" is a common motif in Mississippian culture.

By about 1400, the settlement was abandoned. There are several ideas of why this happened

Scholar has proposed environmental factors such as over-hunting and deforestation as

explanations. Another possible cause is invasion by outside peoples, though the only evidence of
warfare found so far is the wooden stockade and watchtowers that enclosed Cahokia's main

ceremonial precinct. Diseases transmitted among the large, dense population are another possible

cause of decline, but nothing has been proved. Even so, there are things that have transcended

the era of the Cahokian people, such as artifacts, bones, and of course the mounds, that aide our

imaginations in visualizing the magnificence of what was mighty Cahokia