Cahokia

The Cahokia Mounds: The Lost City Larger Than London

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Monks Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a large grass-covered terraced earthen mound with a long wooden staircase leading to its flat summit, under a blue sky

About 6 min readAround 1100 CE, a city of perhaps 20,000 people stood on the Mississippi floodplain near modern St. Louis — larger than London at the time. Its builders left no written records, only enormous earthen mounds, a solar calendar of cedar posts, and one of archaeology’s greatest puzzles: why it was abandoned.