The remnants of the Mississippian’s central city – now known as Cahokia for the Native Americans who lived nearby in the late 1600s – are preserved within the 2200-acre tract that is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Located just eight miles east of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, near Collinsville, Illinois.
Filed under: archeology, history, usa
Cahokia is an amazing site, and it really brings home just how sophisticated Native Americans were prior to European arrival in North America. Once you begin to understand how advanced their buildings were, extensive their trade networks, and the like, you can no longer think of them as “primitives.”
The first time I came across Cahokia was listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 on the day I blogged this. I also learned it was many years before white Americans would admit it was made by the very people whose land they’d conquered.