The Mound Builders of Cahokia

     While we often tend to assume that Jamestown and Plymouth were the first lasting city-like regions to have been created upon the current territory of the United States, we, at the same time, forget the historical marvel that is the Mounds of Cahokia, a once thriving and populous Native American city that endured a legacy of more than seven hundred years (from 700 A.D. to 1400 A.D.). Considered one of the finest achievements of the Native Americans, the Mounds of Cahokia were composed of approximately 120 large man-made structures that appear as large hills and held at times more than 100,000 people. They are situated near present-day St. Louis, Missouri, and along the Mississippi River and partly in Illinois, and the ruins of the city indicate a developed civilization that possessed interesting features like platform mounds with religious temples, a surrounding barrier of the city with guard towers, and about four sun calendars that were utilized to determine when the seasons will change and what that will entail for preparation on the part of the city inhabitants. Similar to the famous ruins of Machu Picchu, the structure of Cahokia involved the usage of large open plazas with living quarters surrounding the public areas, and to maintain its economic infrastructure, agriculture was highly emphasized and practiced around the city sites in large open tracts of land. They are considered by some institutions today as an optimal example of the cultural, religious and economic achievements of pre-historic Mississippian Culture.
     While Cahokia was by far the most populous and dense city present in the entire North American continent after the Mayan and Aztec civilizations of Mexico, the region underwent a tremendous population decline by 1200 and was completely vacant by 1400. Oddly enough, there are no written records of which particular tribe created this historic marvel, nor is there a definitive reason for why the site was abandoned, leading historians to arrive at a variety of reasons for its demise. By the time European settlers like the French arrived in the Mississippi Valley around the 1700s, the site began to deteriorate from further population growth and construction plans as settlers moved westward, destroying some of the created hills. Today, Cahokia is credited as being one of the eight world heritage sites within the United States, and only about sixty-eight of the original 120 mounds still exist, thus retaining some Cahokia's legacy as a unique and phenomenal site.

   

Works Cited:
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/il-cahokia.html
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/cahokia/hodges-text
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/198