Understanding Cahokia requires understanding this network, and understanding the network requires recognizing that the societies of pre-contact North America were capable of the kinds of long-distance organization and exchange that later writers sometimes assumed were the exclusive achievement of Old World civilizations.

The People Who Lived There Day to Day

The dominant image of Cahokia in popular accounts tends to be monumental — the mounds, the plazas, the evidence of political and ceremonial power.

But Cahokia was also, and perhaps most importantly, a place where ordinary people lived ordinary lives, and the evidence for those lives is as revealing as the more spectacular architectural features.

The residential archaeology of Cahokia shows houses of various sizes arranged in organized neighborhoods.