It was a managed adaptation to changing circumstances — one that preserved and disseminated the cultural achievements of Cahokia even as the specific urban center that had been their most elaborate expression became uninhabitable.

The people of Cahokia did not disappear.

They distributed themselves across a landscape that their city had shaped, carrying with them the knowledge, the skills, the symbolic traditions, and the social relationships that had made the city what it was.

The Site’s Future and the Stories Still to Come

The archaeology of Cahokia is not finished.

It will not be finished in the lifetimes of any of the scholars currently working on it.

The site is too complex, the evidence too abundant, and the analytical techniques too rapidly evolving for any current synthesis to be anything other than provisional.