Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say the city was spawned by a social movement that swept across the US south and Midwest, along the shores of the Mississippi River. Some call Cahokia a city built on religion, but its origins were more complicated than that. And these unfolded against a backdrop of living urban history in the Americas, embodied in massive earthworks and stone monuments, whose origins went back thousands of years.īased on what we know from indigenous oral histories and observations by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, it’s likely that Cahokia was founded by leaders-or maybe one charismatic leader-who promised a spiritual and cultural rebirth. Instead, there were powerful but ever-changing social movements that temporarily united tribes and nations, and whose closest modern analogues might be political revolutions or religious revivals. But in North America, there was no entrenched medieval aristocracy, nor ancient Latin texts hinting at a lost great civilization. At the time, European civilization was mired in the superstitions and brutal monarchies of the Middle Ages. By the reckoning of the Roman calendar, people started erecting Cahokia’s first monuments in the late 900s.
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