Cahokia

The Cahokia were the people of the greatest city of the Mississippian culture, which rose on the Mississippi floodplain opposite present-day Saint Louis around 1050. Around 1100 it held fifteen to twenty thousand people and some hundred and twenty mounds across six square miles, its trade linking the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

At its centre stood Monks Mound, a four-terraced, thirty-metre platform, the largest pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mexico, crowned by a temple or ruler's residence; nearby timber circles called woodhenges marked the solstices, while Mound 72's rich burials show falcon imagery and sacrificed retainers.

The city's original name and the precise identity of its people are unrecorded, though linguistic evidence points to a Dhegiha Siouan-speaking population. Drought, floods, deforestation and upheaval emptied it by about 1350, leaving plazas and mounds to later archaeologists.