SocietyNorth America
Cahokia
North America's largest city before 1800, on the Mississippi
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Monks Mound holds over six hundred thousand cubic metres of earth, carried there in baskets. The city had a timber palisade, a solar calendar of posts, and a settlement pattern replanned in one great reorganisation around 1050. Why it was abandoned is unsettled — flooding, deforestation and climate change have all been proposed.
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On the Mississippi stood a city of perhaps twenty thousand people and an earthen mound with a larger footprint than the Great Pyramid at Giza. It was abandoned around 1350, and no European saw it while it lived.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org