Changed my mind about the Cahokia mounds after walking them last week

I drove down to Collinsville, Illinois about 10 days ago to finally see the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. For years I had this dumb idea that they were just small hills with a little museum attached, nothing worth a 4 hour drive. But I got out there around 9am and started walking the Monk's Mound trail, and the sheer scale of it hit me different. That main mound is over 100 feet tall and covers like 14 acres at the base, you really cannot grasp that from pictures. What got me was thinking about how they moved all that dirt in woven baskets, no wheels, no draft animals, just people carrying loads day after day. I had always assumed it was maybe 200 people living there but apparently Cahokia had 20,000 residents at its peak, bigger than London at the time. Has anyone else visited a site like that and had their whole mental picture flipped upside down?

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona_fox561mo ago

Wait, London around 1300AD was bigger than that actually, around 80k people.

brookebailey1mo ago

Wait, are you sure about 80k for 1300? I always thought it was more like 60k to 70k at its peak before the Black Death hit. The city was still pretty cramped with most folks packed inside the old Roman walls, and it wasn't until after the plague that the population really dropped hard, down to maybe 30k or 40k by 1377. Do you have a source that says different? I could be off, but that's what I remember from reading about medieval London's size.