Cahokia: America’s Forgotten Ancient Mega-City

this video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business check out squarespace through the link in the description below more in the middle it was once one of the greatest cities in the whole of north america around a thousand a.d multiple tribes from the mississippian culture descended on an illinois floodplain ready to build almost overnight they threw up an unprecedentedly complex urban society covering 4 000 acres and housing up to 20 000 people the city at its height was not only bigger than any other north of the rio grande it dwarfed even european icons like london and paris dominated by grand earth and mounds that soared up to a hundred feet into the air it was simply one of the greatest settlements of its era yet it's not just its size or complexity that makes cahokia so fascinating but what happened to it when first visited by europeans in 1540 the sai was already long abandoned by its original inhabitants so what caused these pre-columbian peoples to walk away from this once bustling metropolis the answer lies in the spellbinding tale of america's forgotten ancient megacity [Music] a stone's throw from lewis illinois lies one of the strangest most underrated heritage sites in america covering some four thousand acres immediately south of the dwight d eisenhower highway the pre-columbian settlement of kaokia is a place like no other for a millennium now nearly 120 vast earthen mounds have stood here some reaching heights of 100 feet around them are the traces of what was once a vast and bustling city a place that drew people from across the region yet the reasons for its building or what its builders called themselves have been lost to time even its modern name kaoka is likely a later invention in many ways both the life and death of america's first great city remain a tantalizing mystery the story of kaokia starts with the rise of what we today call the mississippian culture a catch-all term for the native american tribes living around the mississippi ohio and tennessee river valleys rather than being one great monolith mississippian culture covers a wide diverse set of peoples many of whom harvested wildly different crops and lived wildly different lives despite this though there is one thing that seems to have united them the mississippians appear to have loved nothing more than building themselves giant earthen mounds from around 3400 bc when the wachita mounds were first built in louisiana mississippian people seemed to have engaged in a millennia-long building spree the reasons for this are unclear but probably had something to do with religion the mount perhaps allowing priests or chiefs to be elevated close to the sun they also allowed for greater civic organization than the area had ever previously seen the thing about building a whacking great pyramid of earth is that it's not something you can just knock up in a drunken afternoon at a time when everything would have to be carried by hand in woven baskets such construction work would have required a strong central authority a good grasp of logistics and the ability to produce excess food to stop all your builders from starving to death but it would be in the creation of kyoki that these organizational skills really reached their peak interestingly there's little in the early history of kokut to suggest why it became so important originally founded around 700 a.d it probably started life as just another village on the illinois flood plain one notable only for the success its inhabitants had in farming corn for some historians though this choice of crop was likely key to the site's future around 980 a climactic shift saw increased rainfall in the central mississippi valley for pre-columbian dudes living there at first it was probably a case of oh great more damn rain but that opinion would have quickly shifted see excess rainfall means an excess of corn which in turn means a surplus which in turn means an easy way to feed people working on gigantic construction projects by 9 50 a.d we can find a specific carbon isotope in skeletons from this era one which strongly suggests everyone was chowing down on way more corn than previously and that's important because 950 a.d is just before kaoku exploded just 50 years later work began on the biggest earthen mound in the city the one known today as monk's mound it was the start of something called the big bang an era when thousands of diverse peoples would suddenly flood into karaoke working in unison to build the greatest city this side of the rio grande by the time they'd finished the history of pre-columbian america would have been completely transformed for archaeologists studying kaokia the craziest thing about the big bang isn't the way this random village suddenly transformed into a bustling metropolis it's not even the sheer number of earth and mounds that builders manage to construct it's the fact that they did all this to a preconceived urban plan from the moment work started on the monks mound kaokia seems to have been a pre-planned city like brasilia without the modern architecture or canberra without the drunken aussies the center was oriented east west using the positions of the sun and moon to give it its layout it was also built systematically this wasn't some free for all with people working on their own plots at their own pace rather it seems like everyone coordinated to finish the monk's mound first before moving on to other structures and this is just scratching the surface of what makes the building of kaohia so fascinating for one thing there's no sign of forced labor that means participation must have been voluntary perhaps on the basis that this was some great spiritual undertaking the workforce too was extremely multicultural combining several distinct peoples found throughout the mississippian culture from the choctaw to the nashes in fact it's estimated up to a third of kirk's inhabitants hailed from some far-off tribe impressive as all this is though it has nothing on the city itself within 50 years scores a vast earth and mans had been completed alongside a grand plaza and residential districts before a century was out kyogre had grown big enough to rival london in size it would be another seven centuries before any other city in america or canada grew so big at least that's the general consensus we should note here that there are some historians who think we've all been overestimating keoki's size and that it never really grew beyond 10 000 people rather than the 20 000 commonly cited still even at the lower end of that scale kaokia would have been huge for its time and place and a great deal of the ore that inspired would have been thanks to the structures themselves of these the greatest without a doubt was the monk's mound a later name given in the 18th century when trappist monks tended gardens on its sides with no idea what the monks mound was called by keoji's inhabitants but we do know it must have been unbelievably important standing at 100 foot tall the mound held the record of the tallest man-made structure in america until 1867. that means that abraham lincoln might have said that's the biggest building i've ever seen i've never seen the like of it before and it wasn't just impressive in height containing 22 million cubic feet of soil the monk's mound has a larger base than even the great pyramid of giza since mississippian cultures had no beasts of burden all this earth had to be carried by hand in woven baskets a certainly back-breaking task yet it's beneath this outward coating of earth that the mound's true genius lies the core of the monk's mound is a gigantic block of clay the curious choice since kyochia stands on a flood plain and clay is an absolute demon at absorbing water this means it swells when wet and shrinks when dry a perfect storm for cracking and ultimately destroying any structures that are built from it incredibly the kaokians didn't just understand this instability they constructed a perfect mechanism for dealing with it by exposing the slab to wet ground they allowed it to remain constantly damp through water absorption to stop this water then evaporating away they sealed the slab's top with alternating layers of sand and clay a mixture that also allowed rainwater to drain away rather than further moisten it the result was a clay slab kept at a constant size it was no longer plagued by instability and strong enough to last a thousand years it was an impressive start to cookia a sign that the ancient builders clearly knew what they were doing but it wasn't the only great project undertaken in this ancient city in no time at all the mississippians would have squeezed enough wonders in their sight to rival anywhere else on earth now if you're looking to build an online wonder it's time to head over to our 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burning man look like a bunch of wankers in a sand pit days before the festival began food and drink would be sourced from far and wide and carried into the city in a great procession traces of the highly caffeinated yarpon holly have been found on beaker shards a plant that only grew hundreds of miles away and likely took great effort to collect not that girls were only interested in getting caffeinated analysis of the city's waste bits of found people would gorge themselves on food throughout the festivities a single spectacular event is thought to have seen over 2 000 deer eaten it's thought dozens of cooks would work in shifts to keep everyone fed while all around them people danced placed bets on games and watched athletes perform amazing physical feats there may even have been intricate sky dances like the ones that still take place in mexico in which participants tied themselves to a tall pole and left off in a feat of soaring acrobatics at the very least the existence of these polls suggests some vital ritual took place involving them but hey maybe parties aren't your thing maybe you dig more spiritual stuff in that case you could skip the festivities on the ground plaza and take your time machines straight to woodhenge a series of timber circles the biggest of which had a diameter of about 410 feet woodhenge gets its name from the way its 48 posts line up with the solar calendar similar to stonehenge every equinox the sight lines from the center of the henge mean the sun appears to rise out of the front of the monk's mound suggesting that this was a place of religious significance today it's thought people gathered here for rituals every equinox and solstice marking the passage of time through the motion of the sun and the moon in fact the whole of kaokia may have been built for similar spiritual purposes the university of illinois architect timothy paukat has noted that the mating of water at dry land holds symbolism for many modern cultures descended from the keokians there's a city built across a flood plain he suggests keokia may have been intended to represent the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead with burial mounds built at the wettest places it's possible then that the entire city was meant to be a spiritual crossroads a place where the ghosts of forgotten ancestors were always close not that every mound was a burial site or everyone in kyokia was only there for religious purposes some mounds were topped with the homes of the wealthy while outlying districts provided thousands of regular folk with a place to live year round all of which naturally raises a question what was daily life here really like [Music] one of the slightly galling things about researching kaokia is that its inhabitants had no written language and left behind no records while this isn't all that unusual for an ancient people it does mean our understanding is limited to what excavations can tell us luckily archaeology is still uncovered enough to afford us a fascinating glimpse of locals lives outside of the grand plaza and the town center most of those in kaokia lived in relative simplicity the homes were usually single room affairs some 15 foot long with walls made of posts covered with mats and a roof matron thatch each of these homes was clustered around a communal courtyard which formed the backbone of its neighborhood a place where the women meant to socialize make pottery or weave mats during the day the men by contrast probably spent their time hunting clearing trees chopping wood and helping store corn not that kaokia only survived by importing food for storage the wider area was surrounded by farmland part of a region we might call greater kaohia where possibly another twenty to thirty thousand lived but while the city was mostly agricultural it also appears to have engaged in trade various digs of uncovered shells brought all the way from the gulf of mexico alongside copper from the great lakes whether it dominated its local region as an all-powerful overlord though or was simply a place through which goods and people flowed is unknown still life of keoku seems to have been pleasant enough with time off for socializing and playing games the most interesting of which has to be chunky a deceptively simple sport chunky involved rolling around stone disk across the ground before the stone could stop participants would hurl sticks at it trying to land closest and win a point as they did this they'd be surrounded by a crowd of people shouting bets until astronomical sums had been waged they got so big it wasn't uncommon for losers to commit suicide rather than pay up but if that sounds a little grim well you need to know that death was just a part of what made kaoki a tick by that we mean evidence has been uncovered that its residents practiced human sacrifice mound 72 as it's known today is clearly a burial mound of some kind one dedicated to a powerful dead dude called birdman we can tell ancient michael keaton was important because he was buried with the bodies of 53 women who seemed to have been sacrificed for this purpose but the bloodletting at kaokia doesn't seem to have stopped there there's evidence of mass graves containing scores of young women who appear to have been ritually strangled alongside at least one pit containing several men who were beaten to death exactly what role all this killing played in kyoki's culture is impossible to say but we know for a fact that the city was likely steeped in violence over a single century starting in 1175 the defensive stockade circling the city was rebuilt again and again so why would they go to such an effort well the obvious answer seems to be that there was something probably another tribe but possibly shoghos that the inhabitants were desperately trying to keep out curiously though no arrowheads or signs of warfare have ever been found within kaokia rather than violence itself it seems it was the threat of violence which encouraged the mississippians to reinforce their city warfare or no warfare though kaoki's luck would eventually run out although it had only sprang into being around a thousand a.d reaching its item a century later america's greatest pre-columbian city was almost at its end by the time the europeans finally showed up like the world's worst houseguests sparing gifts of genocide and smallpox kaokia's time would already be over until recently we thought we knew what had caused keoki's collapse a widely accepted theory proposed that extensive deforestation by the inhabitants had led to increased flooding flooding which destroyed crops and spread disease in 2021 though a new study published in the journal geoarchaeology revealed no evidence of widespread flooding around the time of the city's decline which isn't to say the environment didn't play some role in kyogre's abandonment for example there's evidence a major drought hit the region in keoki's final decades potentially placing pressure on flood stocks on the other hand it also looks like there was a serious earthquake sometime in the 13th century that could have driven people away oh hey maybe the evidence of warfare in the surrounding region explains why everyone fled or maybe it was a combination of a whole ton of things until finally the hungry earthquake struck residents were all like you know what screw this stupid place let's leave the fact is we basically don't know what killed kaokia all we know is that sometime between 1350 and 1400 its remaining inhabitants packed their bags and dispersed among the other mississippian cultures leaving behind a dead city of silent mounds for anyone stood in keoku at this time that silence must have been immense the sort of silence you could only get in places built for life which have now been emptied of people it was a silence that reached beyond the confines of the city itself and deep into folklore as you'll remember if you watched our cascadia earthquake video native american oral traditions often preserve tales of great calamities from tsunamis to civilizational destruction but in the case of kaokia there's nothing no cycle of legends that explain why america's greatest pre-columbian city might have fallen in fact it never seems to be mentioned at all yet that doesn't mean kaokia was entirely forgotten sometime in the early 1500s within a century or a century and a half of its abandonment kaoku was reoccupied this time by tribes of the illinois confederation by the time the first european to reach this area hernando de soto stumbled across the city in 1540 kaokia was once again home to a steady population crucially though the native americans the europeans encountered in the ruins had no idea who built kaokia and that allowed europeans to come up with all sorts of crazy ass theories the thing was the city's mounds were impressive so impressive that it was considered beyond the skill of native americans so why people twisted themselves and knots trying to demonstrate how the real builders must have been vikings or egyptians or one of the lost tribes of israel that was when they paid attention to them at all even as kaoki's new population shrank through a combination of disease and warfare eventually evaporating away to nothing in the early 1800s those settling in america showed a remarkable lack of interest in this incredible site of course there were exceptions in 1811 henry brack and ridge wrote a superlative account of the mounds comparing them to the pyramids of egypt because he was firmly of the opinion that the builders were native americans most of the press ignored him even when he got his close friend thomas jefferson to conduct a survey and corroborate his findings people were still like indians built that ah don't be ridiculous it was probably aliens or romans or jesus the worst part this ignorance had consequences the indian removal act of 1830 was predicated on the idea that native americans were incapable of being civilized by portraying the great civilization of kaokiri as the work of an unknown race worse claiming the native tribes had evidently exterminated that race the u.s would justify all the cruelties of the trail of tears [Music] you know that jenny mitchell lyric about how they paved paradise and put up a parking lot well that's kind of how old timey folk treated the ruins of kaohir in 1931 for example a bunch of horseradish farmers carried away the ancient city's second biggest mound for phil an earthen pyramid that had survived a thousand years destroyed just helped grow more of the world's second worst condiment still in some ways this was fortunate nearby st louis was originally nicknamed mound city thanks to all the building done there by keoki's neighbors by the late 19th century the mounds had been leveled used for soil by railroad workers nor did the desecration stop there over the decades coker itself was used for everything from an airfield to the site of a drive-in which mostly showed pornography even today the collinsville road still runs right smack through the middle of the ancient plaza while this is calling though there's only so much anger we can muster for the roads bisecting kaokia after all it was a road which ultimately saved the site from any more destruction prior to the 1950s the only protected part of kaoku was monk's mound which had been made at tiny state park in 1925 but then president eisenhower came along with his plan to build a massive network of interstate highways a plan that came with millions of dollars earmarked for archaeological surveys along each road's route it was this provision and the arrival of i-55-70 that finally made america sit up and take note of keoki's heritage the archaeological digs revealed that this wasn't just some handy place for getting soil to grow horseradish but a site where thousands upon thousands of people had once lived worked and died in an era lost a time the revelations from the highway program dig were so fascinating that the area was designated as a national historic landmark in 1964. jump forward 18 years and it was added to unesco's list of world heritage sites fast forward to today and the importance of kaohia is widely recognized every year some dig or study teaches us something new about what was for centuries the largest city in american history we're constantly uncovering fascinating stories about the mississippians who built it and yet in some senses kaokia is just as neglected as it's ever been in nearby saint louis the gateway arch has been standing only since 1965. it's an impressive enough structure with a great view at the top a view that allows it to pull in over 2 million visitors annually by contrast kaokia just 14 minutes drive away clocks barely 200 000 visitors in an average year and it's a number that's falling think about that for a second here we have one of the most important sites in u.s history perhaps the only american site that could compete with somewhere like stonehenge or newgrange and yet it remains almost unknown by the general public for 90 percent of tourists who never even dream of venturing beyond the gateway arch we could go on bemoaning the neglect playing the grumpy old man wondering why kids today don't care about history but maybe it's unnecessary today protected and restored kaoka could speak for itself just one glance is enough to appreciate the magic of this place to see the inaugural evidence of the advanced society that once existed here the culture that built it might be long gone but the architectural works they left behind remain impressive to this very day so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Geographics

Views: 320,440

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Id: H5MB5_KlOOQ

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021