The population did not die.

It dispersed.

People moved away from the city, settling in other communities across the region, carrying with them elements of the Mississippian cultural tradition that continued to develop in other forms after Cahokia itself was gone.

This pattern of dispersal rather than catastrophe is important for understanding what Cahokia was.

A people who were wiped out would leave a different kind of archaeological record.

The people of Cahokia left evidence of a managed decline — of a population that made decisions about where to go as their city became less able to sustain them — and the descendants of those people continued to shape the history of the eastern half of North America for centuries after the mounds were abandoned.