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America’s ancient city predates your history books
Eight miles east of St. Louis, a 100-foot earthen pyramid rises from the Mississippi River floodplain. It has a bigger footprint than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The city that once surrounded it may have held as many people as London did in the same century. Almost no one knows it’s there.
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and what you find there rewrites the story of North America.
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A city of 20,000 people built on the floodplain
People first settled this stretch of floodplain around 700 A.D., but things changed fast around 1050 A.D. Construction scaled up, the population surged, and what grew here became the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico…