Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

Beginning around the year 1050, the people archaeologists call the Mississippians built at Cahokia a true city, laid out with purpose around great mounds and open plazas. It was a center of trade, religion, and power whose influence reached far across the continent, and at its peak it may have held tens of thousands of people, making it larger than many contemporary European cities.

The city was a marvel of organization. Its builders raised more than a hundred mounds of different shapes and purposes, aligned structures to the movements of the sun, and drew in goods and people from across a vast region. Cahokia stands as proof, written in earth, of the scale and complexity of Native civilization in the ancient Midwest.

Cahokia is not the work of a mysterious lost people. It is ancestral to living Native nations, connected to the many peoples of the Mississippian world and to the tribes of this region, including the peoples of the Illinois Confederacy, whose descendants today are enrolled in the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and others whose histories reach back into this land. The mounds are a sacred inheritance, and the descendants of the mound builders continue their cultures today.

The name Cahokia comes from a later tribe who lived in the area when the French arrived, not from the city's original builders, whose own name for their city is not known. The site should be approached with the respect due to a holy and living heritage, a place of ancestors, not a curiosity of the distant past.

Monks Mound is the great centerpiece, an enormous earthen platform covering many acres at its base and rising in broad terraces to a flat summit that once held a large building at the city's political and spiritual heart. It was built entirely by hand, one carried basket of earth at a time, over many generations, and it remains the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Americas. A stair climbs to the top, where the view takes in the whole floodplain and, on a clear day, the modern skyline of St. Louis beyond.

Nearby stands the reconstructed Woodhenge, a great circle of tall wooden posts that the Cahokians used to mark the movements of the sun through the year, aligning to the sunrise at the solstices and equinoxes. Standing within it makes plain how deeply the builders understood the sky, and how carefully they wove astronomy into the life of their city.

The interpretive center is the place to begin, with exhibits and a full-scale recreation of a Mississippian village that bring the ancient city to life before you set out to walk it. From there, trails and roads lead among the surviving mounds, across the open ground where the grand plaza once lay, and up the slopes of Monks Mound.

The site is broad and largely open to the sky, so it rewards time and good preparation, water, sun protection, and sturdy shoes. Walking the grounds, mound to mound and plaza to plaza, is the way to feel the true scale of what the Cahokians built, a whole city shaped from the earth of the river bottom.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.