Site: http://www.mississippian-artifacts.com/:

Mound building activity in the Mississippi delta has been dated to 8000 BC. "Cahokia", misnamed for the sept of the Illini who arrived during the colonial period (1600s), was the largest community North of the Lake Cities of Tenochtitlan, in North America, until its decline. 300 years before Columbus, the Mounds were uninhabited. Now preserved just outside of St. Louis.

Nature dictated that the settlement rise near the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Geographers affectionately call the lowlands that hug the eastern bank of the Mississippi there the "American Bottom." This fertile strip was carved and flooded summer after summer by torrents of glacial melt-off 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age.

As the glaciers receded and rivers shrank to their current size, the 80-mile-wide bottom was exposed. From 700 A.D. this easy-to-till land was prime real estate for growing corn, even without steel plows and oxen. Thick sod blanketed the surrounding prairie.

"The most notable Mississippian civil centers were Spiro Mounds in what is now eastern Oklahoma, Moundville in Alabama, Etowah Mounds in northern Georgia, and the largest and most elaborate center at Cahokia Mounds in present-day Collinsville, Illinois." {Near St. Louis.}

Flint culture. Fighting bows, with quivers. High stockade, walled compounds, town square, with chungke field. Painted grayware ceramics with tempering materials (shell), but no kilns. Engraving, inscribing, head pots. Stoneware and pipes. Copper from Lake Superior (hammered into sheets, then shaped). Quartz and Flourite for projectile points from Tennesee. Bauxite carved into effigy. Trade flourished. But no evidence of contact with Mexico. Woven cloth (preserved by copper salt or char).

Large hoes manufactured from Chert, for cultivating corn.

No sanitation system, dense habitation. Fuel - early fires were oak, then finally pines. Deforestation would also lead to soil bogging and depletion.

"Massive earthen mounds of varying size and function dominated the great Mississippian landscape. At Cahokia, a 13th century population of approximately 30,000 inhabitants built flat top mounds for buildings and other mounds for burials and boundary markers. The largest Cahokian mound, Monks Mound, has two terraces and a massive base measuring 739,224 square feet making it one quarter larger than the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Atop Monks Mound was the residence of the leading chief, known as the Great Sun...". Commoners worked the fields and barrow pits. Gender division of labor.

It had its own "wood-henge" astronomy - circles of stumps, including a key-stump at the winter solstice, and now reconstructed. Lords manipulated symbols to control commoners.

Almost all ceramics are focussed on service or fertility rather than warfare.

"Cahokia's population was greater than any contemporary European city of the day, and it wasn't until the late 18th century that a North American City, Philadelphia, finally had population that eclipsed that of 13th Century Cahokia.

Meals - corn, squash, pumpkin, herbs. Population growth apparently led to malnourishment and contagious disease.

Mound 72 - 53 young women strangled and buried two deep all together, with one Lord on a bed of shells, with four male "attendants". {Video does not mention their hands and heads removed. Also no mention of human sacrifice, charnel house with 50 men tossed into a deep pit, etc.}.

All of the mound communities were abandoned by the 17th century. No sign of invasion, plague or natural disaster has been uncovered. The video-tape suggests that its success with agriculture led to its downfall: depletion of the woods alone could explain decline; climatic changes; shortages leading to internal social collapse; by 1400 it was over.

Only 1% of Cahokia has been excavated.