The Great Mound — “Monks Mound” — at Cahokia. Photo by Mike Luoma.

The Mounds of Cahokia

“One of the best kept secrets in American history…”

Mike Luoma
6 min readAug 30, 2021

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The fifth largest pyramid in the world…

The largest earthwork in North America…

Like Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza, this has been designated a World Heritage Site by the UN.

It’s also a National Historic Landmark.

The Great Mound at Cahokia, Illinois. Photo by Mike Luoma.

This is the Great Mound at Cahokia, in southwestern Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri — you can see the city and its arch from the top the mound.

It’s 100 feet high. Covering about 14 acres, its footprint rivals that of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. About 21 million cubic feet of dirt went into its construction, which occurred from about 900 A.D. to around 1250 A.D., built by an urban agrarian culture we call The Mississippians.

Likely home to 20,000 people at its peak, the population of the ancient city of Cahokia rivaled and may have surpassed those of contemporary European cities like London or Paris.

This hierarchical Native American society was more like Egypt under the Pharaohs than the stereotypical portrayals of nomadic wanderers we see in pop culture. Like the Pharaohs, the leader here seems to have been considered semi divine, with powers tied to the sun.

Monks Mound. Photo by Mike Luoma.

Many Mississippians were temple mound builders, constructing flat-topped mounds on which they placed elite dwellings, workshops, and ritual centers. It’s likely the chief, the leader, would have lived atop the Great Mound. They also built conical burial mounds. We often see flat topped mounds paired with rounded burial mounds at Mississippian sites around the southeast and Midwest.

They built at least 120 mounds at Cahokia. About 70 remain or were reconstructed. Many were plowed down for farmland and destroyed over time. Many mounds were lost as the American frontier pushed West.

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Mike Luoma

Author, Podcaster, Radio Host & Music Director, Explorer, Researcher, Science Fiction & Comic Book Creator. From Vermont.