The archaeological record is clear that Cahokia was not an isolated anomaly.

It was the largest and most complex node in a network of Mississippian communities that extended across the Mississippi Valley and beyond.

Smaller mound centers — some of them substantial communities in their own right, though none approaching Cahokia’s scale — were distributed across a large geographic area, connected by river travel, by trade, and by the sharing of religious, artistic, and organizational practices that defined the broader Mississippian tradition.

Some of the Native nations of the eastern United States today are understood to be the cultural and biological descendants of Mississippian communities.