Cahokia is a direct refutation of this image.

The city left enormous marks on the landscape, marks that have survived more than a thousand years of natural weathering, agricultural plowing, urban development, and deliberate destruction.

The total volume of earth moved to construct the Cahokia mound complex — mounds, palisades, plazas, and related earthworks — has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of cubic feet.

These estimates are necessarily imprecise, because not all of the mounds have been fully excavated or surveyed, and because the construction sequence of individual mounds is not always precisely known.

But even conservative estimates of the labor involved are staggering.