Cahokia begins its great expansion

1000

On the Mississippi floodplain near present-day St. Louis, a farming village swelled into a planned ceremonial center with rising earthen pyramids. Within a century its population would rival contemporary London. Corn agriculture and long-distance trade knit together the greatest native metropolis north of Mexico. Exotic goods from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes flowed through its plazas, evidence of a vast continental network.