There are more than 100 mounds in Cahokia, 17 which lay within a palisade city center. The 6 ridge top mounds purpose is unknown. Four were located at strategic points on the cites diamond shaped boundaries and its axis and may have been official markers.
The largest mound, called "Monks Mound", was named for French trapper/monks who lived nearby and gardened on the mound in the early 1800's. Monks Mound was situated in the middle of the city, at the north end of the Central Plaza. This mound covered more than fourteen acres and rose in four terraces to a height of 100 feet, making it the largest prehistoric earthen structure in the Western hemisphere. On the top of the terraces, plumes of smoke came from shrines where guardians tended sacred fires night and day. On one side of the mound was the creek where traders loaded and unloaded their goods and on the other three sides a heavy wooden palisade.
Monks Mound was built in a dozen or more phases over the course of two centuries. Each stage demanded the labor of thousands of Indians hauling 60-pound baskets of earth.
Excavations reveal that a massive ceremonial building or maybe a temple or palace stood on the highest terrace and measured 104 feet long, 48 feet wide, and maybe 50 feet high. Smaller structures and at least two other mounds were built on the lower terraces. Monks Mound was enlarged several times over a period of 300 years, from 1100-800 BP and slightly until 800 BP. The archeologists calculate that it contains 22 million cubic feet of earth dug with stone tools and carried in baskets on people's backs to the construction site. Some samples of the core of the mound disclose that Cahokia's engineers used soil varying textures to build different parts of the mound, ...
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...and hands missing were found near the largest sacrificial pit, which held the skeletons of 53 women between the ages of 15 and 25. Several other mass burials were also uncovered.
The center of the city was surrounded by a 2-mile-long stockade - a wall of posts set in trenches, with projecting bastions (guard towers) every 70 feet. The stockade was constructed four times, and each construction took nearly 20,000 logs. Built for defense, it would also serve as a social barrier, segregating the more sacred precinct and the elite who lived there. Several sections of the stockade have been reconstructed.
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Denny, Sidney G. Indian Tribes. Prairie Grove, AR: Ozark Pub, 1997. P.3
Moorehead, Warren K., and John E. Kelly. The Cahokia Mounds. Tuscaloosa, Ala:
University of Alabama P, 2000. P.2
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