Cahokia

The American City Bigger Than London

De: Shane Larson

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

For seven hundred years, the largest city on the continent above Mexico stood on the Mississippi. Nobody remembers its name.

In 1050, a generation of builders raised a metropolis on the floodplain east of modern St. Louis. Fifteen to twenty thousand people lived inside it. Monks Mound rose ten stories above the plain and held more carried earth than the Great Pyramid uses in its base courses. The Grand Plaza in front of it was fifty acres of leveled clay. A timber sun-calendar tracked the solstices. More than one hundred and twenty smaller mounds ringed the core, and trade goods from a thousand miles in every direction — copper from Lake Superior, shell from the Gulf, mica from the Appalachians — moved through its markets.

No other settlement north of Mexico would match its size until Philadelphia, more than seven centuries later.

Cahokia: The Lost City of North America reconstructs what archaeologists, mound surveyors, and Indigenous oral history have pieced back together about a civilization the United States spent two hundred years pretending did not exist.

What you'll learn:

• How a city of twenty thousand rose on the Mississippi in a single human generation around the year 1050
• The actual function of Monks Mound, the Grand Plaza, and the timber Woodhenge — and what they reveal about Cahokian astronomy and power
• What the Mound 72 burial — a high-status body laid on twenty thousand shell beads, accompanied by sacrificed retainers — tells us about ritual, hierarchy, and violence at the city's peak
• The continental trade network that pulled copper, marine shell, mica, and obsidian into the Mississippi heartland
• Why Cahokia declined for two centuries and was finally abandoned by 1350
• How the racist "Moundbuilder Myth" kept the site's true history out of American textbooks for generations
• What still stands today at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, and how to read the landscape when you visit

This book is for you if:

• You loved Charles Mann's 1491 and wanted the Cahokia chapter expanded into a full book
• You're drawn to lost cities, collapse narratives, and civilizations that vanished from the historical record
• You want the deeper backstory of the continent before European contact
• You enjoyed Ancient Apocalypse, Twilight of the Ziggurats, or The Phoenicians
• You live anywhere in the Midwest and want to understand the city in your own backyard

Americans live in a country that contains a lost city. This is its story.