The study of the agricultural landscape around Cahokia — the fields, irrigation features, and soil management practices that supported the city’s food supply — is another active research frontier.

Remote sensing and soil chemistry analyses are beginning to reveal the spatial organization of the agricultural system in ways that ground-based investigation alone could not achieve.

The synthesis of all of these lines of evidence is producing a picture of Cahokia that is both more complex and more comprehensible than earlier interpretations allowed.

The city was not simply a ceremonial center with a large population clustered around it.

It was a functionally differentiated urban landscape with distinct zones for different activities, a sophisticated environmental management system, and a social organization that integrated people from a wide geographic area into a single, complex community.