Mound 72’s assemblage is a reminder that Cahokia was not a utopia.

The evidence suggests a society with significant social stratification, in which the distance between the most powerful and the least powerful was enormous, and in which the rituals that confirmed and communicated that hierarchy could be costly in human terms.

A City Carved From the Earth

The physical scale of the human labor required to build Cahokia cannot be overstated, and it deserves sustained attention because it is one of the aspects of the city that most dramatically challenges the assumptions that many Americans carry about the societies that existed in North America before European contact.

The conventional American historical imagination tends to populate pre-contact North America with relatively small groups of people — hunters and gatherers, or small-scale farmers — living in ways that left little permanent mark on the landscape.