Cahokia
- History Fix Podcast
- Nov 16
- 22 min read
Episode 139: Why We Misunderstand the Scale of Indigenous Civilizations in North America
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We know there were vast and impressive cities in the Americas before European contact. The stone buildings and pyramids are still there: Chichen Itza on the Yucatan Peninsula, Palenque, Tikal, La Danta pyramid at El Mirador, greater in volume than the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the mystical remains of Machu Picchu, nestled in the Andes Mountains of Peru. We know these once great cities flourished in Central and South America because the stones are still there to prove it. But when we think of North America, the area that is now the United States, we don’t tend to think of ancient great cities like this. Huts in the woods maybe, but certainly not megalithic structures, highways, sprawling urbanization, an advanced and complex society. That doesn’t characterize the indigenous cultures of North America at all in our minds. But it should, because, for around 800 years there was a city just like this, the largest pre-Colombian city north of Mexico, a North American city that, if you were to have visited in the year 1200 is theorized to have been larger than both London and Paris at that same time. In fact, it held the record for largest city in the now United States for almost 700 years from around 1100 until Philadelphia broke the record in the 1780s. A city we don’t know the actual name of, a city we call by a name given to it by a separate group of people hundreds of years later: Cahokia. Never heard of it? I hadn’t either. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This past spring I had the honor of attending a local event on Roanoke Island hosted by the Secotan Alliance called “In the Spirit of Wingina.” It’s a yearly event but this was my first time attending and I’m so glad I did. I was invited by the head of the Secotan Alliance, Gray Parsons, who you’re actually going to hear from next week. Such a treat, get excited. But anyway, this event is this beautiful mix of indigenous people from the region sharing the stories and the culture and the perspective of their people and academic experts and scholars from near and far sharing the academic side of indigenous histories. For example, Michael Oberg spoke at the event the year before, I interviewed him for my Roanoke Colonies two parter, episodes 27 and 28. Anyway, one of the speakers, Dr. Karen Kupperman, a retired history professor from NYU, she got up on the podium and she started talking about an indigenous city in present day Illinois called Cahokia. This wasn’t just a little village settlement type thing like we typically see in pre-Colombian North America, this was a proper city. And I was shocked, honestly shocked, that I had never heard of Cahokia. Like, I’m sure if you’re from Illinois, at least I hope if you're from Illinois, that you learn about Cahokia in school. But we did not learn about Cahokia in North Carolina and that to me is a big problem. So I taught Social Studies for a few years and I know some grades focus on state history and some grades focus on US history, some do world history, etc. And so what this means to me, not having learned about Cahokia in school in North Carolina, is that it’s probably been relegated to state history, Illinois or even Missouri, because it’s right across the Mississippi from Missouiri, history. We didn’t learn about it in US history. We certainly didn’t learn about it in world history. That’s a problem. Because Cahokia is significant. Cahokia changes everything we know about the indigenous people of North America. It casts an entirely different light on their level of sophistication. A light that, if I’m feeling conspiratorial, I might even say was intentionally extinguished. It’s a lot easier to justify oppressing disorganized godless savages than it is a technologically advanced, organized, and intelligent civilization.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the scale of indigenous people living in what is now the United States before the English arrived, before Roanoke, before Jamestown, before Plymouth. You have to understand, when those colonists arrived, the ones who left the records that became our history books, when they arrived in the late 1500 and early 1600s, 90 to 96 percent of the indigenous people living here had already died of diseases brought by earlier explorers. 90 to 96 percent. Those numbers are astronomical. They are unmatched in everything else we know about human history on Earth. Never before or, thankfully, since do we see death rates like that in the entire history of humans. This was profound loss of life. Whole villages died, bodies just piled up, no one to bury the bodies. Squanto? Interpreter and teacher to the Plymouth Colony of first Thanksgiving fame, when he returned to his village of Pawtuxet after being sold into slavery in Europe and miraculously returning, when he returned, his entire village was dead of disease, just bodies. He was the only survivor. The Wampanoag who sat down for that meal, who, perhaps foolishly, befriended the English, you want to know why they did that? Because they had lost 75% of their population to disease and this put them at a disadvantage. They needed the English as allies to protect them from their enemies. Check out episode 36 about Thanksgiving for more on all that. But what I’m trying to say here is that when the English colonists who wrote our history arrived, they encountered less than 10 percent of the indigenous people who once dominated this region. They found only humble villages crippled by disease. They stumbled upon a post-apocalyptic world, an apocalypse that they had unknowingly unleashed with their own foreign germs. And they thought that was it. They thought that was all there had ever been. These people were just that far behind them, that primitive. And that was convenient of course for the plans that they had, plans of domination and assimilation, extermination, and so they ran with it.
But if they could go back a few hundred years, they would have seen a different world entirely, a pre-apocalyptic world, bustling, intimidating. If they could go to Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi around 1200, to Cahokia, they would have discovered a city that out citied even their own London at the time. But it wasn’t until the 1700s that French colonists arrived in the area that was once Cahokia. They stumbled upon the earthen work ceremonial mounds the city is known for and destroyed many of them in the 1800s, leveled them, used them as fill to build the city of St. Louis. At the time, it was believed the mounds were built by earlier colonists from Europe or even mysterious wanderers, the lost tribes of Israel perhaps? Yes, both of those impossible theories made more sense to 19th century St. Louisans than just the people we already know lived in the area building the mounds. Because we had the completely wrong idea of the scale and potential of indigenous Americans, what they were able to accomplish.
So let’s talk about Cahokia now, North America’s very own lost city in many ways. What was it like and what the heck happened to it? Starting around the year 600, indigenous Americans of what we refer to as the Mississippian culture began to settle in what was probably a small village at first on the banks of the Mississippi river, just across the river from what is now St. Louis. This location, the banks of the Mississippi river, was the perfect place for a village. The river bank had fertile soil and the river provided a neverending fresh water supply and a means of easy transportation for trade with areas as far as the Great Lakes to the north and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. When it comes to successful civilizations, it really is location, location, location. Look at any great city that’s been around for any significant period of time, I promise you it’s on a river: London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, Cairo, Alexandria, Shanghai, Bangkok, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and Cahokia. It was perfectly poised on the banks of the Mississippi, near where it merges actually with the Missouri and Illinois Rivers, to grow into something grand, and grow it did. By around 1100, Cahokia had grown to cover up to six square miles with a population ranging somewhere towards a high estimate of 40,000 people. This would have made it the largest city in what is now the United States until Philadelphia’s population reached 40,000 in the 1780s.
I need to mention, we call it Cahokia but that is not what it was called at the time. After Cahokia was abandoned, we’ll come back to that, I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but after it was abandoned, Algonquian speaking people eventually moved into and settled the region in the mid 1600s. One of those groups was the Cahokia Tribe. This is where the name comes from but these were not the people who were living in the city of Cahokia, they merely settled on its ruins a few centuries later. We don’t know for sure what the actual city was called although oral tradition from the Ponca people who lived in the Great Plains region suggests that their ancestors came from Cahokia and they call it P’ahé’žíde (P’ah-hay’-zhjee-deh). I’m gonna call it Cahokia cause it’s way easier to say and also that’s what it’s called now.
Anyway, back in 600, it was likely just a small settlement of maybe around 100 indigenous Americans belonging to the Mississippian culture. But, in such a great location, that village grew and grew. By the year 1000, Cahokia was the largest village in the area with around 1,000 residents and it was quickly growing into something even more. A lot of this growth had to do with corn, or maize as it was called. Maize came from farther south, from Central America and Mexico. But it took a long time for maize to work in the area that’s now the United States. The climate is different. Most of Mexico is in the tropics. Cahokia, in the near smack dab of the United States, is not. Winters are cold and icy, not like in Mexico and Central America where it stays warm year round. So it took a while for maize to adapt to this new climate. This is a big part of why development in the Americas and sharing, intermingling between cultures was slower than in Eurasia. Eurasia spans east to west. It’s all on a similar latitude. It has a similar enough climate. The Americas span north to south. The climate varies too much for the sharing of crops and agricultural styles and even clothing and houses and ways of life. It doesn’t translate. It can’t be easily adapted. The seasons are opposite, the climates are too different, and so, in the Americas, we see all these separate groups doing their own things. They’re far more isolated. In Eurasia we have a lot more sharing happening because of the east/west orientation. And so we see development happening much more quickly there. It has nothing to do with the intelligence of various races as they would have you believe and everything to do with geographical convenience. So it takes a while for maize to adapt to the climate of the midwest. Actual evolution has to take place and that takes time.
By the year 900 maize has finally adapted to the region enough to be usable as a food source and by 1050 we see what’s referred to as a “big bang” happen in Cahokia. What started as subsistence farming, with the addition of successful corn harvests, turned into surplus farming. Now, farmers are growing more crops than they even need to eat themselves for survival. They have something of value now, something to barter with, corn as money in a sense. And with things of value comes social status. By 1050 we see certain lucky farmers rising through the ranks and a social hierarchy forming. We see a population explosion and we see the expansion of what was once a village into an actual city. Timothy R. Pauketat who is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois explains in an article for The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History quote “It seems unlikely that the early success and agricultural output of Cahokia alone was the reason for events that followed. But at or shortly after AD 1050, everything at and around the old village of Cahokia changed. The exact year is uncertain owing to the imprecision of radiocarbon dating, but it is clear from archaeological discoveries that, over a very short period of time, a small group of planners—perhaps even one single person—redesigned Cahokia from a village into a city. Implementing the new design meant that hundreds of old village houses had to be ripped down and, in some areas, the naturally undulating bottomland had to be leveled. Cahokia’s huge earthen pyramids and plazas were built. Around them, new neighborhoods were laid out, with homes now built with prefabricated sapling walls each topped with a thatched roof. Inside these one-room houses, there was enough space for a family of five to sleep; store their possessions, dried foodstuffs, and cooking wares; and build a small fire to heat the interior,” end quote. A complete rework of the village into a city, possibly even planned and masterminded by one single individual. Very interesting.
Cahokia is most well known for its earthenwork mounds, 120 of them, only 80 of which survive today. These were painstakingly built by thousands of workers over decades as they moved more than 55 million cubic feet of soil, likely carried by hand in woven baskets, basket by basket to create ceremonial mounds and great city plazas. The largest mound is called Monk’s Mound and it is still there today. It was called that, Monk’s Mound, because of some actual Catholic monks who lived on the site in the early 1800s, unrelated to the original purpose of the mound. Monks Mound was likely the center of Cahokia. It’s the main pyramid, if you can call it that, covering around 15 acres and rising up to 100 feet in the air which makes it the third largest pyramid in the Americas. A fifty acre rectangular plaza sat at the foot of Monks Mound. This would have been used for public gatherings and ceremonial events and rituals. Cahokia is also known for what’s called its woodhenge. Get it, like stonehenge but woodhenge? These are a series of big circles made out of cedar tree trunks sunk into the ground. Each woodhenge circle that was built was larger by 12 more tree trunks than the last. Because of the multiples of 12, it’s believed that the woodhenges were associated with the lunar calendar, AKA the calendar, the number of lunar months in the year which is 12 months. Pauketat theorizes that woodhenges were used to time the major festivals of the year. So this tells us a few things. It tells us that Cahokians were interested in astronomy and they were paying attention to the sky and orienting things with astronomical events. It also tells us that they were a spiritual people because they are having festivals and ceremonies and such.
In fact, researchers believe that, as Cahokia grew in size, it became a religious center for the greater area, a mecca if you will. Farmers from surrounding areas and even distant pilgrims likely travelled to Cahokia at certain times of year for these religious ceremonies. Pauketat writes quote “Cahokian religion seems to have merged beliefs about life and death with the movements of stars, sun, and moon in the heavens. Specific deities were recognized, the most prominent being a female goddess (depicted in small red stone sculptures found at and around Cahokia). The goddess is depicted associated with the bones of the dead, a monstrous mythical serpent, and agricultural crops. Offerings to her were probably intended to ensure a good harvest,” end quote. Well how bout that, a female goddess? I always find that interesting. Further proof of this goddess can be found at the Rattlesnake Mound which is mound 66. This mound is connected to the main part of the city by the Rattlesnake Causeway, which is this 2,600 foot long raised embankment, like a road, like a highway, that leads to this Rattlesnake burial mound. Because the causeway is astronomically aligned with the southern moon rise, it was thought to be associated with what Wikipedia calls a lunar maize goddess of the underworld. I love it. I want to know her name.
Now we know, and I learned this from Michael Oberg actually, that indigenous American religions were usually quite different from the religions of Europe in ways that led them to be badly misunderstood. So, the religion of Europe being Christianity of course. In Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam you worship a God, the one true God, you worship God and, in return, he protects you from the devil, from Satan, who is essentially a god of the underworld really, same concept. I know that’s probably not PC to say because these are monotheistic religions but in a lot of ways the devil is a god of the underworld. In Indigenous American religions, there are various gods. Some of them are benevolent, nice, good, right? And some of them have the power to do you harm. Here’s the difference. You don’t need to worship the benevolent ones. They aren’t going to mess with you. You need to worship the dangerous ones, the ones with the power to do you harm, because, if you worship them, they’ll leave you alone. So this pivotal religious difference was misinterpreted by Europeans as devil worship. Why are they worshipping the bad gods, the evil gods? The devil? Because it just worked differently. Their religion worked differently and if you understood their religion, you would get it. In Christianity, you pray to God to give you a good harvest. In many indigenous American religions, you pray to a being more closely aligned with the devil to spare your harvest, if that makes sense. Just a different approach to religion.
So it seems people in Cahokia were worshipping this lunar maize goddess of the underworld and part of that worship involved human sacrifice. Evidence of this was uncovered during excavations in the late 1960s at mound 72. The Rattlesnake burial mound and Causeway is very near mound 72 so it’s all part of this burial and ceremonial death complex. In the 1960s they excavated mount 72 and made some startling discoveries. They found the remains of around 270 people. Which, okay, makes sense, this is a burial mound. But the way that they found some of them is startling. One body of a man was buried on a bed of 10,000 disc shaped shell beads arranged in the shape of a falcon with his head on top of the bird’s head. So this was obviously someone very important. This tells us mound 72 wasn’t just like the intercity cemetery for any old body. This was a special burial place. Near the birdman burial they also found a collection of all different types of arrowheads from different geographical regions sorted into 4 distinct types which suggests extensive trade throughout all of North America. Of the 270 some skeletons found in mound 72, scientists believe around 62% of them were victims of human sacrifice. How do we know that? Well, there were the bodies of four young males all missing their heads and hands. That’s not exactly a natural death. Then we have a mass grave of more than 50 women all around 21 years old. Their bodies were arranged in two layers separated by matting. Fifty 21 year old women didn’t just happen to all die at the same time. They were clearly sacrificed. Then we also have a mass burial of around 40 men and women who seem to have been violently killed and many of them appear to have been buried when they were still alive. We think this because of the vertical position of their fingers when they were buried as if they were trying to dig themselves out either of the dirt or of the mass of bodies. I know that’s a terrible mental image. So, how do we know they were human sacrifices, couldn’t they have been enemies or something? Well you don’t usually have a bunch of 21 year old women as enemies. Also, you don’t typically put your mass grave of enemies with your guy who was so important, someone made a bird mosaic out of 10,000 shell beads for him. So this is pretty clear evidence of human sacrifice, likely to appease this lunar maize underworld goddess. Give her the souls for her underworld, she’ll give you a good maize harvest, that sort of thing.
But, you know, Cahokians weren’t just like these blood thirsty violent people. They’re religion was very different, to say the least, but for the most part they led normal, even relatable lives. Pauketat writes quote “Almost all socializing, gaming, and work happened outdoors. A day in the life of an average Cahokian family involved spending most of the day working in the fields, fishing, and hunting. The women and girls probably tended the crops, snared some game, and collected greens, berries, and roots. The men and boys worked in the fields too, and made short hunting and fishing excursions to the lakes and forests within two- or three-days’ walk of Cahokia. Most evening meals would find all gathered together, perhaps with extended families and friends, mending nets, grinding corn, working wood, resharpening their stone hoe or axe blades, and telling stories around the outdoor cookfires. Some might be making things for the next festival,” end quote. Better hope you’re not part of the next festival. We also know they played a game, a sport, called chunkey. So this consisted of rolling a stone disc across a field and then, while it’s still rolling, throwing spears, essentially, and trying to get your spear to land where you think the disc is going to end up. And it’s like, I assume, whoever gets closest to the disc wins or like scores higher or whatever. Kind of like a mix between bocce ball and darts. Sounds very hard. So, you know, it’s not all sacrificing virgins, they have fun and games too.
Shortly after the big bang population boom in 1050, we see Cahokia expand even well beyond its borders. This expansion is referred to as “Cahokianization.” People from Cahokia, we know, reached as far away as Trempealeau (tromp-e-low), Wisconsin some 500 miles away. Pauketat explains quote “The local people were unlike Cahokians, and built small burial mounds in the shapes of animals. Upon their arrival, Cahokians built a temple-and-pyramid complex and conducted the same sorts of religious rites they had conducted in their homeland. They used pots, hoe blades, and utensils imported from Cahokia, and they played chunkey using the stone disks they had carried with them. The effects are readily apparent to archaeologists, who refer to this campaign as a "Cahokianization" of some distant places. Some Cahokianized populations, such as people in the Illinois River valley a hundred miles north of Cahokia, developed independently of the city to the south. Initially friendly, the relations between the two might have soured, and by the later 1100s some archaeologists suspect that military actions might have taken place,” end quote.
And this brings us to the eventual downfall of Cahokia. Like with many airquotes “lost” cities, as you know if you listened to episodes 131 and 132, the reasons for the demise of a city are often a bit of a question mark. There are a lot of theories that seek to explain why Cahokia, absolutely booming around 1200, was completely deserted by 1350. One of them, although not a great one really, involves warfare with neighboring groups. The only real evidence of this is that a gigantic palisade wall was built around the year 1160 around the center of the city. The wall was 2 miles long and used some 15,000 logs. It also had bastions, these little projections, which were places where you could shoot arrows through at enemies. So, no one builds this if there isn’t some kind of threat of violence. This isn’t just like a fun side project, a hobby. This thing served a military purpose. Perhaps they Cahokianized one too many places. The others were fed up with these invaders from Cahokia? However, there’s no real evidence that Cahokia was ever actually attacked. There would be evidence of warfare, arrow heads and spear heads littering the ground in a particular layer and there isn't. They had the wall but it doesn’t actually seem like they even needed to use it. Interestingly though, there is evidence that part of the city was burned down around the same time the wall was built. Was this an attack by outsiders? Or did the Cahokians do it themselves? They were thought to have used fires in rituals. Perhaps this was some kind of ritual burning to commemorate the death of a leader? Seems kind of crazy to me to burn down your own city for any reason that’s not accidental but, then again, maybe it was accidental.
Whatever the reason for the fire and the wall, they signified a turning point in Cahokia. People began to leave the city. By the middle of the 1200s, Cahokia’s population was reduced by half and by 1350 it was completely deserted. But it wasn’t just Cahokia. People left this whole region, what is now southern Illinois, around this time. It’s referred to by scientists as the “Vacant Quarter.” But why? If it’s the whole region and not just the city, that leads me to think it was environmental and not political. Could it have been deforestation, droughts, overhunting, pollution, flooding, climate change? We know there were droughts in the 1100s and 1200s. We know, what’s referred to as the Little Ice Age that affected Europe starting around 1300 also affected the Americas. This may have messed with maize harvests, making it impossible to sustain that many people, as many as 40,000 people in Cahokia.
But it’s likely political unrest and cultural problems played into it as well. Cahokia was really a city of immigrants. The population didn’t explode in 1050 because people were having lots of babies. The population exploded because people were moving to the city in droves, this cultural, religious center. From studying burials, we know that a lot of Cahokian’s didn’t actually come from Cahokia. They moved to that area from elsewhere, sometimes even very far away. We can tell this based on analysis of their bones and what they were eating at different times in their life and where those food sources are found. It’s believed that Cahokians came from all different ethnic groups. They likely spoke different languages and had different customs and traditions. This may have caused problems because it meant that there wasn’t one united cohesive Cahokian culture. It’s a problem we see in the modern world too. It’s a problem I see in America right now, the ultimate melting pot - an intolerance for differentness. Going back to the burials and the bone analysis, we often find Cahokians of different ethnic groups buried separately from one another. This says a lot.
Another theory has to do with health issues. As Cahokia grew, it became more and more unsanitary. They didn’t have a sewer system in Cahokia so the problem arises, as it does elsewhere in the world at the same time, of what to do with waste. No one can thrive while wallowing in poop. If there’s anything history’s taught us it’s that. But there may have been another health issue at play too - malnutrition. We know Cahokian’s primarily ate corn but here’s the thing with corn, it has very little nutritional value. It’s almost indigestible, in fact. In order to make corn nutritious enough to serve as a food source, I’ve talked about this before, you have to process it in a process developed by the Maya called nixtamalization where you treat the corn with lime. This turns it into hominy which is actually worth eating. We know that Cahokians were doing this, nixtamalization of the corn, around 1050 when the big bang population explosion happened. But by 1200 they’ve stopped nixtamalizing the corn for some reason. This is a problem because eating primarily un-nixtamalized corn can lead to pellagra which is caused by a niacin deficiency and, left untreated, leads to death. Analysis of bones has revealed iron deficiencies and tooth enamel defects which suggest an over-reliance on corn. But other than that there’s no hard evidence that Cahokia’s downfall came from people mass dying of pellagra.
Honestly, it’s probably some combination of all of them. We have the palisade wall which suggests some kind of outside threat. We have known climate change and droughts happening around the time threatening food supplies. We have a mix of people from different ethnic groups and cultures who we know didn’t quite homogenize because they were buried in separate places. All of these pressures together likely led to the mass exodus that ultimately caused the death of Cahokia. And I think that was made easier by the fact that a lot of people who lived there weren’t originally from there anyway. If you try to go move to another country, say, you move to Italy or something. Totally randomly threw that out there, nothing against Italy. Let’s say you try to move to Italy. You live there for a few years and then things start to take a turn for the worse. There’s the threat of violence from a neighboring country, a war could break out any day. Food’s not great, there’s a potential famine looming. The people aren’t getting along very well. Are you going to stay in Italy? Or are you probably going to go back to your home country? So the fact that a lot of the people weren’t from Cahokia to begin with, they didn’t have ancestral roots there, made it easier for them to leave.
What’s interesting though is the way that the city seems to have been sort of forgotten about afterwards. Pauketat writes quote “Whoever they became, and however Cahokia fell, another important archaeological mystery yet remains. Possible descendants include the peoples of great American Indian nations and tribal groups met by Lewis and Clark in 1804 or painted by George Catlin in the 1830s. And yet among them, including the Quapaw, Omaha, Pawnee, and others, there are no stories that speak of the city of Cahokia. Why might the descendants of Cahokia have chosen to forget Cahokia?” end quote. Later, Algonquian speaking groups like the actual Cahokia moved west and re-inhabited the region starting in the 1600s and around a century after that the French arrived. The United States eventually purchased the area as part of the Louisiana purchase in 1804. It wasn’t until 1920 that anyone decided to care enough to start excavating the mounds at Cahokia and learning about this ancient civilization. But, according to Pauketat, the ruins are still at risk. He writes quote “...answers might remain in the ruins of Cahokia, the central portion of which is preserved within Illinois’ Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. But most of the suburban complexes, associated towns, and hundreds of farming villages and religious shrines that have not already been destroyed today are yet unprotected. We owe it to the descendants of this once-great place, if not to American history generally, to preserve that which is left—mounds, the buried debris of religious festivals, and the rotted remains of thousands of homes,” end quote.
What I find so interesting about the story of Cahokia is that it rose and fell all before European contact, pre-apocalyptic, and yet still apocalyptic. I think that’s important to point out because, and I hope this won’t be perceived the wrong way, I’m about truth guys, I’m not about picking sides. I’m a truth seeker. I think it’s an interesting example because pretty much all of the destruction experienced by indigenous Americans is blamed on European invaders. And there’s a good reason for that. 90 to 96 percent killed by European disease. And then you have literal extermination and forced enslavement, ie King Philip’s War. You have mass removal with Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, leading to what’s often called the Trail of Tears. You have policies that did and still do keep indigenous people oppressed. But the story of Cahokia is completely untouched by the stain of European conquest. It rose and fell of its own accord. We can’t blame Europe for the fall of Cahokia. Its flaws were its own. And it’s an important reminder that all humans are humans. All humans are flawed. It’s not that indigenous Americans are good and European conquerors are bad or vice versa. It’s that all humans are flawed beings and all humans still have a lot to figure out. And, most importantly, we. are. all. humans. That’s the takeaway for me this week. If humans in Egypt or Rome or Tenochtitlan were capable of organizing into great civilizations with monolithic structures than so were humans in southern Illinois. If the Spanish could conquer the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca and replace their way of life with the Spanish way, then the Cahokia could conquer the people of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, the Illinois River valley, and replace their way of life too, Cahokianization. If the great city of Troy could fall into ruin and be almost entirely forgotten in the centuries that followed, so too could Cahokia. We are all humans. We are not so different from one another. And one of our greatest flaws is thinking that we are.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. As always, source material for this episode can be found in the show notes. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
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