North of Mexico, the pre-Colombian settlement of Cahokia was the most influential and
intricate Native American community in North America. A society of mound builders, which
endured from about 9500 B.C. to 1400 A.D., they set up a massive trading center complete with
their own types of governing bodies, architecture, religion, sophisticated farming, and local
specialties. In one way or another, the Cahokian culture touched even the far reaches of the
present day United States, " from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, from the Atlantic coast to
Oklahoma", all from its central location in the Mississippi region. It is for these reasons that
Cahokia was a superior power in the New World before the Europeans came, and even now, can
be considered important and mighty.
The first factor that indicates the might of the Cahokian culture is the great structures of
earth that they created for public buildings, residences of the nobility, religious purposes, and as
burial ground. These mounds, 120 in number, were built on an area exceeding five square miles,
and usually were between six and twelve feet in height. The largest mound however, named
Monks mound for the colony of Trappist monks who later tried colonize atop the construction,
covers today 14 acres at the base and rises 100 feet in height. What is even mightier about this
mound, which happens to be the "largest pre-historic earthen structure in the New World", is that
it took over 19 million hours of labor to complete, and that it was done all by hand. The 22
million cubic feet of dirt it took to form the mound, was deposited in stages from about 900 to
1200 A.D.. The greatness that is Monks mound was probably used for governing, ceremonies,
and for the Cahokian leaders' living spaces and burial plots. Another remarkable mound in
Cahokia, simply called Mound 72, was designed by the Cahokians so that one end of it face...