The site offered the agricultural productivity to feed a large population, the river access to maintain trade connections across a continental scale, and the environmental resources — timber, clay, stone — necessary to support urban construction and craft production.

The same geographic advantages that made the American Bottom attractive to the Mississippian builders of Cahokia made it attractive to later agricultural populations.

The region was among the first areas of the interior to be settled by American farmers moving west in the early nineteenth century, and the fertility of the bottomland soils made it immediately productive agricultural land.

That agricultural use is one of the reasons so many of the smaller Cahokia mounds were destroyed — they were obstacles to farming, and they were leveled or plowed down over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Monk’s Mound and the Science of Soil