Cahokia at its zenith

1100

On the Mississippi floodplain across from present-day St. Louis, a city of perhaps twenty thousand people hummed around earthen pyramids taller than anything north of Mexico. Copper from Superior, shell from the Gulf, and obsidian from the Rockies passed through its plazas. At its peak, Cahokia's Monks Mound covered more ground than the Great Pyramid at Giza, anchoring a ceremonial landscape unmatched anywhere in pre-Columbian North America.