Studies of Cahokia skeletal samples have found individuals whose tooth enamel signatures indicate origins far from the American Bottom — people who had grown up elsewhere and migrated to the city.

This finding supports the view of Cahokia as a genuinely cosmopolitan urban center, drawing population from a wide area rather than simply growing from the existing local population.

The identification, through a combination of excavation and remote sensing, of neighborhood-level organization within the city — evidence that different parts of the site were occupied by people with different social statuses, different economic activities, and possibly different cultural backgrounds.

The organization of the city was more complex than the simple elite-center / commoner-periphery model that earlier interpretations had proposed.