Before the United States existed, the largest city north of Mexico stood in Illinois. Cahokia held fifteen to twenty thousand people, raised the biggest earthen mound in the Americas, and ran a trade network from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. Then it emptied — and America forgot it had ever been there.
Cahokia ★ Great Lakes Gulf of Mexico Appalachians Greatest extent — stylized map 1050 CE The 'Big Bang' — a city rises 1350 The plazas empty Rise · zenith · fall The rise Around 1050 CE, something extraordinary happened on the Mississippi floodplain: a settlement exploded into a city within a generation — what archaeologists call the “Big Bang” of Cahokia. The engine was maize. The rich bottomland produced surpluses on a scale the region had never seen, and the surplus fed labor, and the labor built mounds: more than a hundred of them, arranged around vast plazas with the precision of a master plan.
