Cahokia was built by Native people whose cultural and biological descendants continued to live in the region, even as the specific urban center they had created declined and eventually was abandoned.

The people did not disappear.

The city did.

The Economy That Fed a City

Feeding a population of tens of thousands of people in a pre-industrial urban center is not something that happens by accident.

It requires organized agricultural production, reliable systems for getting food from producers to consumers, storage infrastructure to manage seasonal variation, and the administrative capacity to coordinate all of these functions.

Cahokia had all of these things, and the evidence for them is embedded in the archaeological record in ways that have become clearer as excavation and analysis techniques have improved over the past several decades.