It is more American, in the sense of being more accurate about what America is — a place where human societies of extraordinary complexity and creativity have existed for thousands of years, where the history of human achievement is not simply the history of European expansion but the history of all the people who have lived here and built here and created here.

Cahokia is part of that story.

It is not a mystery to be solved or an anomaly to be explained.

It is evidence of what Native people built — evidence that was always there, in the landscape, in the mounds that are too large to be fully erased, in the soil that remembers what was grown and eaten and made and discarded over the course of several centuries of urban life.

The Mississippian tradition that Cahokia exemplified did not die with the city’s abandonment.