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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to bling a truck rewarding.

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Speaker 1: Late last year, we did an episode on the great

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Speaker 1: historical Finds of ten and shortly after that episode published

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Speaker 1: and from St. Louis emailed in a suggestion, and this

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Speaker 1: is what she said. She said, Well, pretty much everyone

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Speaker 1: knows about the astronomical and cultural sophistication of the Maya,

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Speaker 1: the Mississippian civilization seemed to be forgotten and rarely mentioned

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Speaker 1: in history classes, which is a shame. I wonder if

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Speaker 1: you'd consider doing an episode on Kahokia or your favorite

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Speaker 1: other Mississippian site. Fortunately, I hadn't missed Kahokia entirely. I

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Speaker 1: don't remember learning about it in history class. But right

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Speaker 1: before an emailed, actually, there was a National Geographic article

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Speaker 1: that had just published with pictures on the settlement and

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Speaker 1: lots of information about its history, and in part of

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Speaker 1: the article focused on how such an important cultural center

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Speaker 1: had been brushed aside and practically forgotten for centuries. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: not to mention bulldozed over in some cases. Yeah, but

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Speaker 1: we're gonna try to stop that from happening. We're gonna

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Speaker 1: try to at least introduce Kahokia to those of you

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Speaker 1: who haven't heard about it before. We're going to talk

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Speaker 1: about the culture and the city, and the archaeological efforts

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Speaker 1: to better understand the people who live there and the

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Speaker 1: reasons why they disappear. There's kind of a mystery behind

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Speaker 1: the whole thing too. But first we want to look

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Speaker 1: into who were these Mississippians. Anyway, around the year seven

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Speaker 1: hundred a d. A new kind of culture popped up

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Speaker 1: in the in the Mississippi Valley. Scholars differ on their

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Speaker 1: ideas though where exactly it came from. Some think that

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Speaker 1: it was the influence from northern Mexico, which introduced a

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Speaker 1: new agricultural techniques and religious practices. Others think it was

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Speaker 1: simply a major major climate change for the better combined

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Speaker 1: with new ways of thinking. Yeah, but regardless, the culture

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Speaker 1: quickly spread through out the American Midwest and the Southeast.

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Speaker 1: And though Mississippi and settlements were different. They'd have different

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Speaker 1: styles of homes and different styles of pottery, different arrowhead shapes,

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Speaker 1: they did have a few things in common. One of

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Speaker 1: those was an economy based on corn, and the other

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Speaker 1: was a religion based on the sun. But they're also

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Speaker 1: often defined by earth and flat top mounds, and we

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Speaker 1: have some of those mounds here in Ottawa. I think

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Speaker 1: I I visited maybe in fourth grade or so, and

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Speaker 1: you can go walk around the mounds and check them out. There,

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Speaker 1: pretty grass covered hills. It looks like today thousands of

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Speaker 1: years later. But the civilization in Cahokia, which is what

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Speaker 1: is today Collinsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis, took

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Speaker 1: mound building to a whole new level, as as we're

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Speaker 1: going to find out soon. So how did this civilization

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Speaker 1: the city begin? Well, late woodland people probably first started

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Speaker 1: seriously settling the area around seven d a d. It

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Speaker 1: was prime real estate here in what was known as

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Speaker 1: the American Bottom, a floodplain of the Mississippi River. In

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Speaker 1: this area there were three rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri,

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Speaker 1: and the Illinois, and three ecosystems the Ozark Mountains, the Prairie,

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Speaker 1: and the Eastern woodlands. Yeah, so that provided the opportunity

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Speaker 1: to grow a lot of different kinds of crops, and

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Speaker 1: it attracted a lot of different kinds of animals. So

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Speaker 1: it was a good living if if you could, if

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Speaker 1: you could settle there, and people would have grown things

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Speaker 1: like squash and pumpkins and sunflowers, and plus they would

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Speaker 1: have eaten a lot of fish, and they would have

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Speaker 1: been able to travel easily on some of those smaller tributaries.

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Speaker 1: But like later Mississippian cultures, the economy was based on corn.

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Speaker 1: That was the bread and butter for for the Cohokian people.

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Speaker 1: And two things made this crop really successful at the time.

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Speaker 1: One was the development of the flint hoe, which made

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Speaker 1: farming easier, and then the other was a particularly nice

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Speaker 1: climate for a few hundred years there, and as production grew,

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Speaker 1: town started to form. And all of this food, all

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Speaker 1: of the surplus food, meant that time and resources could

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Speaker 1: be devoted to something other than agriculture, something more more advanced.

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Speaker 1: They could make crafts, and they could stockpile grain and

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Speaker 1: trade with other areas and in those crafts, and that

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Speaker 1: surplus corn meant that the people at Kokia traded with

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Speaker 1: tribes all over the Midwest and east. There archaeologists have

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Speaker 1: found shells from the Gulf copper from the Upper Great Lakes,

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Speaker 1: mica from southern Appalachia, and bountiful crops also left time

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Speaker 1: for massive building projects and the organizational infrastructure that was

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Speaker 1: really needed to execute these projects. Yeah. So that's where

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Speaker 1: Kochia comes in. It's a planned city. It's laid out

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Speaker 1: into zones for administration, ceremony, elite homes, regular neighborhoods, suburbs.

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Speaker 1: The large corn fields would have been outside of the

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Speaker 1: city on the floodplain, along with some smaller settlements, while

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Speaker 1: private homes would have kept gardens. Eventually, this settlement grew

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Speaker 1: to cover four thousand acres and it contained one dred

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Speaker 1: and twenty mounds, seventy or still preserved today. Some of

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Speaker 1: them were flat topped mounds which were often terraced and

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Speaker 1: topped with important buildings, and others were conical burial mounds. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And just the logistics of these earthen mounds and building

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Speaker 1: them is really hard to fathom since we are so

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Speaker 1: used to heavy machinery being used for all excavation and

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Speaker 1: building projects. But there were no means of moving earth

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Speaker 1: other than carrying baskets full of it that would weigh

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Speaker 1: about fifty to sixty pounds, and so the earth would

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Speaker 1: come from borrow pits. They would carry the baskets to

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Speaker 1: the mounds under construction, and archaeologists estimate that the site's

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Speaker 1: largest mound, which is called Monks Mound, took fifteen million

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Speaker 1: baskets of earth to build over a period of of

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Speaker 1: hundreds of years probably. I mean, these weren't projects that

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Speaker 1: went up in in a few weeks or months, right,

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Speaker 1: And before you connect to Monks Mounds to some ancient religion,

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Speaker 1: it was actually named for French Trappist monks who garden

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Speaker 1: there in the eighteen hundreds. But regardless, it's definitely the

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Speaker 1: site's most impressive feature. Just few details about it. It's

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Speaker 1: the largest man made earthen mound in North America. It's

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Speaker 1: footprint is bigger than that of the largest of the

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Speaker 1: Great pyramids, and the chief would have lived or operated

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Speaker 1: from its peak and had full command of the land

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Speaker 1: as far as that I could see. Yeah, but the

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Speaker 1: plaza that contained the principal mounds is also really amazing.

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Speaker 1: It was artificially raised and leveled. It's forty acres, which

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Speaker 1: is equivalent to forty five football fields. That will at

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Speaker 1: least help out those of you from North America, I guess.

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Speaker 1: And it would have had room for marketplaces and ceremonial

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Speaker 1: sites in playing fields. So really the center of the

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Speaker 1: city and the whole plaza wasn't just left out on

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Speaker 1: the open plains though for for anybody to come in Sack.

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Speaker 1: It was surrounded by a log stockade that was two

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Speaker 1: miles long, and the temples and most of the elite

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Speaker 1: homes would have been built inside of that stockade protection.

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Speaker 1: There's also evidence of human sacrifice there at Mound seventy two,

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Speaker 1: where there are remains of fifty three women, four were

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Speaker 1: guys that looked like they were possibly executed, and one

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Speaker 1: very elite man who was surrounded by twenty thousand shell

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Speaker 1: beads arranged like a falcon. Yeah. And then there are

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Speaker 1: also some remains of five large woodhenges, and we're going

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Speaker 1: to talk about them a little bit more later. They

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Speaker 1: were made from red cedar, which was considered a sacred wood,

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Speaker 1: and they lined up with the rising sun at different

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Speaker 1: times of the year. And I think this is what

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Speaker 1: made and suggests this topic in the first place, because

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Speaker 1: we had mentioned the Woodhenge and Stonehenge, the Woodhenge at

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Speaker 1: Stonehenge in our Historical Finds podcasts. But the growth of

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Speaker 1: the city around ten fifty is the really stunning thing

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Speaker 1: about this story. Archaeologists call it the Big Bang because

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Speaker 1: it just seems like a boom town, like what we're

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Speaker 1: used to in the wild West, a town popping up

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Speaker 1: over night. Essentially. Yeah, it was marked with the formation

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Speaker 1: of a complex chiefdom, new house styles, new aerostyles, new

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Speaker 1: types of pottery, just a cultural explosion. And just one

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Speaker 1: hundred years after that cultural explosion and estimated twenty thousand

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Speaker 1: people were living in Kahokia, which makes it bigger than

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Speaker 1: London at the time. I feel like that comparison to

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Speaker 1: London keeps on popping up in in podcasts from around

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Speaker 1: the world. Yeah. Interestingly, though not all archaeologists really agree

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Speaker 1: on the size of Kahokia and its influence on the

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Speaker 1: rest of Mississippian culture. One thing they can agree on, though,

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Speaker 1: is that by about twelve fifty the city started to decline,

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Speaker 1: and it was a really slow decline. It wasn't like

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Speaker 1: some epidemic wiped out all twenty thousand people, but by

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Speaker 1: four hundred it was abandoned, and we have to ask

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Speaker 1: why how did that happen. It's possible that there was

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Speaker 1: some sort of climatic change that the climate got cooler

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Speaker 1: and drier, and just that little bit of difference in

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Speaker 1: the corn yield was enough to make the city and

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Speaker 1: its large population unsupportable. It might have brought the bloom

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Speaker 1: years to an end. But there might have been other

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Speaker 1: factors too, And and these aren't mutually exclusive. It's not

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Speaker 1: as though if you discount one you can't accept the other.

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Speaker 1: There might have been outbreaks of disease or warfare. For instance,

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Speaker 1: between eleven seventy five and twelve seventy five, the Stucades

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Speaker 1: were rebuilt several times, suggesting there was some kind of

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Speaker 1: trouble going on outside of Khokia. There might have been

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Speaker 1: environmental degregation too, because it was such a large settlement.

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Speaker 1: They were using a lot of wood for fuel and construction.

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Speaker 1: They were farming so heavily. There might have been agricultural effects, runoff, erosion,

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Speaker 1: that type of thing. And there might have just been

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Speaker 1: some kind of internal struggle, you know, the leader is

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Speaker 1: no longer accepted, or just problems inside of the city. Right. So,

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Speaker 1: with one or some combination of all of those factors,

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Speaker 1: by the time European settlers arrived, the original Cookian inhabitants

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Speaker 1: were long gone from the area. In fact, co Kia

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Speaker 1: is not actually a name connected to the people who

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Speaker 1: built the mounds. Probably comes as a surprise. Yeah, they

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Speaker 1: left no written language, so it instead comes from a

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Speaker 1: subtribe whose name meant wild geese that lived there in

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Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. They were members of the Illinois Confederacy,

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Speaker 1: a much later group of Native Americans who lived there.

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Speaker 1: But regardless of of who these people really were, the

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Speaker 1: mounds that they left behind were definitely stunning, so stunning

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Speaker 1: in fact, that settlers didn't think that they could have

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Speaker 1: been built by Native Americans. People thought that maybe Phoenicians

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Speaker 1: had been here and they had built the mounds, or

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Speaker 1: a tribe of Israel or Vikings, so all sorts of

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Speaker 1: pretty wild out their ideas, rather than just saying it

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Speaker 1: must have been some native people from a long time

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Speaker 1: ago who built these. The first guy to write a

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Speaker 1: report of the site was someone named Henry Breckenridge. He

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Speaker 1: was out exploring the prairie in eighteen eleven, and he

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Speaker 1: was really impressed by what he saw. He said, I

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Speaker 1: was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike which

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Speaker 1: is experienced in contemplating Egyptian pyramids. What a tremendous pile

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Speaker 1: of earth. But it seems like other people we didn't

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Speaker 1: really care, you know. He published this report, it didn't

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Speaker 1: get a big response. He finally got a little bit

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Speaker 1: of a response from President Thomas Jefferson. But later administrations

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Speaker 1: really ignored the site. And that's partly because it didn't

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Speaker 1: jive with ideas held at the time about Indians, ideas

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Speaker 1: that were crucial to relocating them westward, like that they

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Speaker 1: were nomads, they weren't good stewards of the land. Having

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Speaker 1: this massive city and evidence of people living in this

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Speaker 1: settled city for hundreds of years just didn't fit with

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Speaker 1: the announcement that was going out. Yeah, and because this

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Speaker 1: information was brushed aside. Basically, Monks Mound wasn't actually preserved

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Speaker 1: until and even then it was just preserved as a

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Speaker 1: place to sled basically a park, and a lot of

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Speaker 1: other nearby mounds were torn down of Kahokia, the site's

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Speaker 1: second largest mound was raised for filled dirt by horse

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Speaker 1: Radish farmers in nineteen thirty one, and later the site

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Speaker 1: held a gambling hall, a subdivision, and air field, a

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Speaker 1: pornographic drive in at various points, so clearly not much

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Speaker 1: respect for the historical importance of it. It wasn't until

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Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, ironically, that the Interstate Highway program, threatening

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Speaker 1: to tear through the plaza, launched a real big archaeological

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Speaker 1: study of Khokia. And that's when researchers made the discovery

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Speaker 1: that this wasn't just a collection of mounds that served

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Speaker 1: some sort of ceremonial purpose. There was a big city

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Speaker 1: that had been here. They found evidence of homes and

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Speaker 1: pottery and trade and and things that suggested it was

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Speaker 1: a lot more than they thought. Yeah, and a doctor

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Speaker 1: Warren Witchery also theorized that the Woodhenge was a calendar

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Speaker 1: arcs of circles with wooden post set up to line

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Speaker 1: with the rising sun at certain times of the year.

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Speaker 1: So what we're looking at maybe America's first city. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's it's generally considered to be North America's first city.

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Speaker 1: And now it's only one of eight UNESCO World Heritage

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Speaker 1: Cultural Sites in the United States. I checked out the

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Speaker 1: list to see what some of the others are, and

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Speaker 1: they include Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty and Monticello,

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Speaker 1: places that receive so many visitors every year. Yet this

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Speaker 1: place is is still largely unknown, but Just because Kahokia

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Speaker 1: died out in fourteen hundred doesn't mean that other Mississippian

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Speaker 1: cultures went the same way. Others continued to thrive until

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Speaker 1: De Soto's arrival in Tampa in fifty nine, when, unfortunately,

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Speaker 1: after that many of them were killed off by disease

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Speaker 1: or driven off their land. One notable exception is the

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Speaker 1: Natchez people. They lasted well into the seventeen hundreds, and

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Speaker 1: I think we're eventually relocated further out west where where

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Speaker 1: their culture still lasts today. But after learning about Kahokia,

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Speaker 1: I really want to go visit it and and check

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Speaker 1: it out myself. Yeah, it's kind of sad. We talked

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Speaker 1: about these fascinating places and people every week, and we

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Speaker 1: so rarely go to them. We so really get to

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Speaker 1: visit them. But as you'll find with the listener mail

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Speaker 1: we've picked for this week, our listeners are a little luckier.

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Speaker 1: We have been delighted in the last couple of weeks

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Speaker 1: to start receiving several postcards from listener Jesse, who is

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Speaker 1: turning Europe right now and telling us all about it.

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Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna read one of her post cards.

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Speaker 1: She says, Dear Sarah Dublina. Hello, I am Jesse. I

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Speaker 1: just finished grad school at Dartmouth and I'm taking a

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Speaker 1: grand tour i'llah Lord Byron, though not as well funded,

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Speaker 1: around Europe. Fourteen countries and two months. I start my

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Speaker 1: travels in France, where I've been re listening to your

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Speaker 1: Catherine de Medici podcasts. I'm currently listening to The Green

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Speaker 1: Gallant while sunning myself along the Parisians in the tweeler

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Speaker 1: ree garden. Life is good. And she goes on to

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Speaker 1: tell us that she is heading to the Balkans towards

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Speaker 1: the end of her trip, and um, you know a

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Speaker 1: little bit more about the podcast. But we've got a

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Speaker 1: budget of postcards from her. It's pretty cool. We've got

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Speaker 1: one from first Side today, one from Amsterdam, a few

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Speaker 1: from Germany. She went to see Ludwig's Bavarian castles and

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Speaker 1: had lunch on the cathedral steps at Cologne, all sorts

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Speaker 1: of awesome founding things. Yeah, we're totally jealous. And I

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Speaker 1: love this note that she put at the bottom of

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Speaker 1: her first postcard. She says, PS, sorry about the spelling.

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Speaker 1: I'm a physics and engineering major. No worries with a

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Speaker 1: love for history and we love it. Jesse, you're sending

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Speaker 1: us international postcards. We we love it. But I think

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Speaker 1: this is the first time we've gotten this series of

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Speaker 1: them from somebody's grand tour, so it's pretty exciting. And

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Speaker 1: I posted the first batch we got on Facebook and

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Speaker 1: Twitter at misst in History the other day, so you

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Speaker 1: guys can live vicariously too. Yeah, And if you have

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Speaker 1: any more stories of your own travels and how you

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Speaker 1: have connected some information in our podcast to them, please

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Speaker 1: write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot

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Speaker 1: com or Sarah just mentioned looking us up on Twitter

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Speaker 1: at Miston History or on Facebook. And if you want

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Speaker 1: to learn a little bit more about Native American culture,

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Speaker 1: we have an article called or the Clovis the First American.

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Speaker 1: So you just learned about the first American city and

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Speaker 1: the podcast, and go read about the potential first American

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Speaker 1: culture in an article by searching for Clovis on our

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Speaker 1: homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be

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Speaker 1: sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from

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Speaker 1: the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore

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Speaker 1: the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise Download it today

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Speaker 1: on iTunes,