About a thousand years ago, peoples living along the east bank of the Mississippi River began building a magnificent city about 8 miles east of present-day St. Louis in southern Illinois—a dazzling center of civilization that would eventually be inhabited by as many as 20,000 people. Over the next 200 years, the mound-builders of Cahokia (the Cahokians were a tribe of Illiniwek Indians who lived in the region by the 17th century) constructed large flat-topped earthen platforms to support temples, a grand ceremonial plaza, chieftains’ palaces, elaborate wood-and-thatch homes for nobles, and charnel houses. Cahokian laborers hauled basket after […]
