Cahokia was a major Mississippian urban center located in what is now Collinsville, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. Occupied between about A.D. 7u00 and A.D. 1250, the core of the site covered more than two hundred acres and was surrounded by a wooden palisade containing in excess of twenty thousand logs. The city contained more than one hundred mounds, the largest of which rose over one hundred feet above the countryside and covered sixteen acres at its base. Many mounds served as bases for elite residences and public buildings, which were erected on their summits. Cahokia contained plazas, residential districts, a large circular wooden-post monument, and elite burials containing burial goods drawn from the Gulf of Mexico, the Rockies, the southern Appalachians, and the Great Lakes. It is unquestionably the largest prehistoric urban center north of Mexico.
———The people of Cahokia subsisted primarily by farming corn, beans, and squash, along with other startchy-seeded plants. They supplemented this diet by hunting and fishing The site was surrounded by hundreds of smaller settlements, which stretched for almost one hundred miles along the Mississippi. These smaller settlements contributed to Cahokia's support. Cahokia also engaged in, and to some extent controlled, wide-ranging trade that extended from the Pacific Northwest to Florida from the western Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast.
———At its peak (A.D. 1000-1150) Cahokia was home to a highly centralized theocracy, which controlled a large area along the Mississippi containing a population of at least thirty to forty thousand. Archaeological evidence for Cahokia's influence can be traced from the Atzalan site of Wisconsin in the north to the Gulf Coast in the south and from the middle Missouri River of the Dakotas in the west to the Macon Plateau of Georgia in the east. The Cahokia elite were not able to maintain their control over this territory, however. After 1150, the central Mississippi Valley was occupied by smaller, less centralized chiefdoms, and the city began to lose people and influence. When Europeans arrived, Cahokia had been abandoned for nearly four centuries.

UNKNOWN
unknown