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American Indians built a city along the Mississippi River, located opposite modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, which modern archaeologists call Cahokia (right: Monk’s Mound today). It was as large in its day as New York and Philadelphia before the mid-1700s. 10,000 indigenous citizens once called it home and tens of thousands more lived in agricultural hinterlands nearbay. For a time, Cahokia was the center of ancient society in North America.
At its peak around 1100, the city of Cahokia covered more than five square miles and was made up of 120 earthen pyramids (often called “mounds” today). Built entirely of packed earth, the main pyramid—“Monks Mound”—covered fifteen acres and rose in three major terraces to a height of one hundred feet, making it the third largest in the Americas. A fifty-acre rectangular plaza sat at the foot of this tremendous monument. Other plazas stretched out in all directions, and eighty more pyramids and several more plazas were built in two related mound complexes five to six miles away in present-day St. Louis and East St. Louis.
Religious rituals and community festivals were annual affairs, timed to their calendar and seems to have merged beliefs about life and death with the movements of stars, sun, and moon in the heavens. That calendar seems to be commemorated by a large circle of posts, called the “Woodhenge”. Various constructions of this post-circle monument were built with cedar posts that numbered in multiples of twelve, indicating a recognition of the number of lunar months in a year. Presumably, the Woodhenge was used to time the major festivals of the year. Most likely, farmers and more distant pilgrims would show up to take part by listening, singing, dancing, and praying to their gods. They would also play chunkey, which became the official sport of the people. Offerings were made to a female goddess to ensure good harvest. Some of these offerings seem to have included human sacrifices. In several burial mounds and in the ceremonial areas of what archaeologists call the “East St. Louis site,” pits have been found containing the remains of between one and fifty-three young females executed as part of single events.
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