A child’s clay pottery, imperfectly formed and clearly the work of an untrained hand, is as much a piece of Cahokia’s history as Monks Mound or the beaded burial.

The evidence for children in the Cahokia record is a reminder that the city was not populated exclusively by the kinds of people who leave the most dramatic archaeological evidence.

It was populated by families — by parents and children and grandparents — living the ordinary rhythms of daily life within an extraordinary urban landscape.

The American Bottom and Why It Mattered

The geographic context of Cahokia — the American Bottom, the floodplain of the Mississippi River near its confluence with the Missouri and Illinois rivers — was not accidental.