What Doomed a Sprawling City Near St. Louis 1,000 Years Ago?

Excavations at Cahokia, famous for its pre-Columbian mounds, challenge the idea that residents destroyed the city through wood clearing.



Cahokia, across the Mississippi from present-day St. Louis, was a city of roughly 20,000 people at its peak in the 1100s, but was largely abandoned by 1350.Credit...Whitney Curtis for The New York Times

By Asher Elbein
Published April 24, 2021
Updated April 26, 2021

A thousand years ago, a city rose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near what eventually became the city of St. Louis. Sprawling over miles of rich farms, public plazas and earthen mounds, the city — known today as Cahokia — was a thriving hub of immigrants, lavish feasting and religious ceremony. At its peak in the 1100s, Cahokia housed 20,000 people, greater than contemporaneous Paris.

By 1350, Cahokia had largely been abandoned, and why people left the city is one of the greatest mysteries of North American archaeology.

Now, some scientists are arguing that one popular explanation — Cahokia had committed ecocide by destroying its environment, and thus destroyed itself — can be rejected out of hand. Recent excavations at Cahokia led by Caitlin Rankin, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, show that there is no evidence at the site of human-caused erosion or flooding in the city.

Her team’s research, published in the May/June issue of Geoarcheology suggests that stories of great civilizations seemingly laid low by ecological hubris may say more about our current anxieties and assumptions than the archaeological record.

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A mural at the Cahokia Mounds Museum and Interpretive Center shows the city during its heyday, circa 1100.Credit...L.K. Townsend/Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/science/cahokia-mounds-floods.html