June 8, 2011 • 16 mins
Most people have heard of great South and Central American empires, but Mississippian civilizations are more obscure. At its peak, the Mississippian city known as Cahokia was bigger than London. So how did it get so big -- and why was it abandoned?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to bling a truck rewarding.
Late last year, we did an episode on the great
historical Finds of ten and shortly after that episode published
(00:23):
and from St. Louis emailed in a suggestion, and this
is what she said. She said, Well, pretty much everyone
knows about the astronomical and cultural sophistication of the Maya,
the Mississippian civilization seemed to be forgotten and rarely mentioned
in history classes, which is a shame. I wonder if
you'd consider doing an episode on Kahokia or your favorite
other Mississippian site. Fortunately, I hadn't missed Kahokia entirely. I
(00:47):
don't remember learning about it in history class. But right
before an emailed, actually, there was a National Geographic article
that had just published with pictures on the settlement and
lots of information about its history, and in part of
the article focused on how such an important cultural center
had been brushed aside and practically forgotten for centuries. Yeah,
(01:09):
not to mention bulldozed over in some cases. Yeah, but
we're gonna try to stop that from happening. We're gonna
try to at least introduce Kahokia to those of you
who haven't heard about it before. We're going to talk
about the culture and the city, and the archaeological efforts
to better understand the people who live there and the
reasons why they disappear. There's kind of a mystery behind
(01:29):
the whole thing too. But first we want to look
into who were these Mississippians. Anyway, around the year seven
hundred a d. A new kind of culture popped up
in the in the Mississippi Valley. Scholars differ on their
ideas though where exactly it came from. Some think that
it was the influence from northern Mexico, which introduced a
new agricultural techniques and religious practices. Others think it was
(01:52):
simply a major major climate change for the better combined
with new ways of thinking. Yeah, but regardless, the culture
quickly spread through out the American Midwest and the Southeast.
And though Mississippi and settlements were different. They'd have different
styles of homes and different styles of pottery, different arrowhead shapes,
they did have a few things in common. One of
(02:12):
those was an economy based on corn, and the other
was a religion based on the sun. But they're also
often defined by earth and flat top mounds, and we
have some of those mounds here in Ottawa. I think
I I visited maybe in fourth grade or so, and
you can go walk around the mounds and check them out. There,
pretty grass covered hills. It looks like today thousands of
(02:33):
years later. But the civilization in Cahokia, which is what
is today Collinsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis, took
mound building to a whole new level, as as we're
going to find out soon. So how did this civilization
the city begin? Well, late woodland people probably first started
seriously settling the area around seven d a d. It
(02:54):
was prime real estate here in what was known as
the American Bottom, a floodplain of the Mississippi River. In
this area there were three rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri,
and the Illinois, and three ecosystems the Ozark Mountains, the Prairie,
and the Eastern woodlands. Yeah, so that provided the opportunity
to grow a lot of different kinds of crops, and
it attracted a lot of different kinds of animals. So
(03:15):
it was a good living if if you could, if
you could settle there, and people would have grown things
like squash and pumpkins and sunflowers, and plus they would
have eaten a lot of fish, and they would have
been able to travel easily on some of those smaller tributaries.
But like later Mississippian cultures, the economy was based on corn.
That was the bread and butter for for the Cohokian people.
(03:37):
And two things made this crop really successful at the time.
One was the development of the flint hoe, which made
farming easier, and then the other was a particularly nice
climate for a few hundred years there, and as production grew,
town started to form. And all of this food, all
of the surplus food, meant that time and resources could
(03:58):
be devoted to something other than agriculture, something more more advanced.
They could make crafts, and they could stockpile grain and
trade with other areas and in those crafts, and that
surplus corn meant that the people at Kokia traded with
tribes all over the Midwest and east. There archaeologists have
(04:18):
found shells from the Gulf copper from the Upper Great Lakes,
mica from southern Appalachia, and bountiful crops also left time
for massive building projects and the organizational infrastructure that was
really needed to execute these projects. Yeah. So that's where
Kochia comes in. It's a planned city. It's laid out
into zones for administration, ceremony, elite homes, regular neighborhoods, suburbs.
(04:44):
The large corn fields would have been outside of the
city on the floodplain, along with some smaller settlements, while
private homes would have kept gardens. Eventually, this settlement grew
to cover four thousand acres and it contained one dred
and twenty mounds, seventy or still preserved today. Some of
them were flat topped mounds which were often terraced and
topped with important buildings, and others were conical burial mounds. Yeah.
(05:06):
And just the logistics of these earthen mounds and building
them is really hard to fathom since we are so
used to heavy machinery being used for all excavation and
building projects. But there were no means of moving earth
other than carrying baskets full of it that would weigh
about fifty to sixty pounds, and so the earth would
(05:26):
come from borrow pits. They would carry the baskets to
the mounds under construction, and archaeologists estimate that the site's
largest mound, which is called Monks Mound, took fifteen million
baskets of earth to build over a period of of
hundreds of years probably. I mean, these weren't projects that
(05:47):
went up in in a few weeks or months, right,
And before you connect to Monks Mounds to some ancient religion,
it was actually named for French Trappist monks who garden
there in the eighteen hundreds. But regardless, it's definitely the
site's most impressive feature. Just few details about it. It's
the largest man made earthen mound in North America. It's
footprint is bigger than that of the largest of the
(06:07):
Great pyramids, and the chief would have lived or operated
from its peak and had full command of the land
as far as that I could see. Yeah, but the
plaza that contained the principal mounds is also really amazing.
It was artificially raised and leveled. It's forty acres, which
is equivalent to forty five football fields. That will at
least help out those of you from North America, I guess.
(06:28):
And it would have had room for marketplaces and ceremonial
sites in playing fields. So really the center of the
city and the whole plaza wasn't just left out on
the open plains though for for anybody to come in Sack.
It was surrounded by a log stockade that was two
miles long, and the temples and most of the elite
homes would have been built inside of that stockade protection.
(06:53):
There's also evidence of human sacrifice there at Mound seventy two,
where there are remains of fifty three women, four were
guys that looked like they were possibly executed, and one
very elite man who was surrounded by twenty thousand shell
beads arranged like a falcon. Yeah. And then there are
also some remains of five large woodhenges, and we're going
to talk about them a little bit more later. They
(07:15):
were made from red cedar, which was considered a sacred wood,
and they lined up with the rising sun at different
times of the year. And I think this is what
made and suggests this topic in the first place, because
we had mentioned the Woodhenge and Stonehenge, the Woodhenge at
Stonehenge in our Historical Finds podcasts. But the growth of
(07:35):
the city around ten fifty is the really stunning thing
about this story. Archaeologists call it the Big Bang because
it just seems like a boom town, like what we're
used to in the wild West, a town popping up
over night. Essentially. Yeah, it was marked with the formation
of a complex chiefdom, new house styles, new aerostyles, new
types of pottery, just a cultural explosion. And just one
(07:58):
hundred years after that cultural explosion and estimated twenty thousand
people were living in Kahokia, which makes it bigger than
London at the time. I feel like that comparison to
London keeps on popping up in in podcasts from around
the world. Yeah. Interestingly, though not all archaeologists really agree
on the size of Kahokia and its influence on the
(08:19):
rest of Mississippian culture. One thing they can agree on, though,
is that by about twelve fifty the city started to decline,
and it was a really slow decline. It wasn't like
some epidemic wiped out all twenty thousand people, but by
four hundred it was abandoned, and we have to ask
why how did that happen. It's possible that there was
(08:39):
some sort of climatic change that the climate got cooler
and drier, and just that little bit of difference in
the corn yield was enough to make the city and
its large population unsupportable. It might have brought the bloom
years to an end. But there might have been other
factors too, And and these aren't mutually exclusive. It's not
(09:01):
as though if you discount one you can't accept the other.
There might have been outbreaks of disease or warfare. For instance,
between eleven seventy five and twelve seventy five, the Stucades
were rebuilt several times, suggesting there was some kind of
trouble going on outside of Khokia. There might have been
environmental degregation too, because it was such a large settlement.
(09:24):
They were using a lot of wood for fuel and construction.
They were farming so heavily. There might have been agricultural effects, runoff, erosion,
that type of thing. And there might have just been
some kind of internal struggle, you know, the leader is
no longer accepted, or just problems inside of the city. Right. So,
with one or some combination of all of those factors,
(09:47):
by the time European settlers arrived, the original Cookian inhabitants
were long gone from the area. In fact, co Kia
is not actually a name connected to the people who
built the mounds. Probably comes as a surprise. Yeah, they
left no written language, so it instead comes from a
subtribe whose name meant wild geese that lived there in
the sixteen hundreds. They were members of the Illinois Confederacy,
(10:09):
a much later group of Native Americans who lived there.
But regardless of of who these people really were, the
mounds that they left behind were definitely stunning, so stunning
in fact, that settlers didn't think that they could have
been built by Native Americans. People thought that maybe Phoenicians
had been here and they had built the mounds, or
a tribe of Israel or Vikings, so all sorts of
(10:31):
pretty wild out their ideas, rather than just saying it
must have been some native people from a long time
ago who built these. The first guy to write a
report of the site was someone named Henry Breckenridge. He
was out exploring the prairie in eighteen eleven, and he
was really impressed by what he saw. He said, I
was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike which
(10:53):
is experienced in contemplating Egyptian pyramids. What a tremendous pile
of earth. But it seems like other people we didn't
really care, you know. He published this report, it didn't
get a big response. He finally got a little bit
of a response from President Thomas Jefferson. But later administrations
really ignored the site. And that's partly because it didn't
(11:14):
jive with ideas held at the time about Indians, ideas
that were crucial to relocating them westward, like that they
were nomads, they weren't good stewards of the land. Having
this massive city and evidence of people living in this
settled city for hundreds of years just didn't fit with
the announcement that was going out. Yeah, and because this
(11:36):
information was brushed aside. Basically, Monks Mound wasn't actually preserved
until and even then it was just preserved as a
place to sled basically a park, and a lot of
other nearby mounds were torn down of Kahokia, the site's
second largest mound was raised for filled dirt by horse
Radish farmers in nineteen thirty one, and later the site
(11:56):
held a gambling hall, a subdivision, and air field, a
pornographic drive in at various points, so clearly not much
respect for the historical importance of it. It wasn't until
the nineteen sixties, ironically, that the Interstate Highway program, threatening
to tear through the plaza, launched a real big archaeological
(12:17):
study of Khokia. And that's when researchers made the discovery
that this wasn't just a collection of mounds that served
some sort of ceremonial purpose. There was a big city
that had been here. They found evidence of homes and
pottery and trade and and things that suggested it was
a lot more than they thought. Yeah, and a doctor
(12:39):
Warren Witchery also theorized that the Woodhenge was a calendar
arcs of circles with wooden post set up to line
with the rising sun at certain times of the year.
So what we're looking at maybe America's first city. Yeah,
it's it's generally considered to be North America's first city.
And now it's only one of eight UNESCO World Heritage
Cultural Sites in the United States. I checked out the
(13:01):
list to see what some of the others are, and
they include Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty and Monticello,
places that receive so many visitors every year. Yet this
place is is still largely unknown, but Just because Kahokia
died out in fourteen hundred doesn't mean that other Mississippian
cultures went the same way. Others continued to thrive until
(13:24):
De Soto's arrival in Tampa in fifty nine, when, unfortunately,
after that many of them were killed off by disease
or driven off their land. One notable exception is the
Natchez people. They lasted well into the seventeen hundreds, and
I think we're eventually relocated further out west where where
their culture still lasts today. But after learning about Kahokia,
(13:47):
I really want to go visit it and and check
it out myself. Yeah, it's kind of sad. We talked
about these fascinating places and people every week, and we
so rarely go to them. We so really get to
visit them. But as you'll find with the listener mail
we've picked for this week, our listeners are a little luckier.
(14:10):
We have been delighted in the last couple of weeks
to start receiving several postcards from listener Jesse, who is
turning Europe right now and telling us all about it.
So I'm just gonna read one of her post cards.
She says, Dear Sarah Dublina. Hello, I am Jesse. I
just finished grad school at Dartmouth and I'm taking a
(14:32):
grand tour i'llah Lord Byron, though not as well funded,
around Europe. Fourteen countries and two months. I start my
travels in France, where I've been re listening to your
Catherine de Medici podcasts. I'm currently listening to The Green
Gallant while sunning myself along the Parisians in the tweeler
ree garden. Life is good. And she goes on to
tell us that she is heading to the Balkans towards
(14:54):
the end of her trip, and um, you know a
little bit more about the podcast. But we've got a
budget of postcards from her. It's pretty cool. We've got
one from first Side today, one from Amsterdam, a few
from Germany. She went to see Ludwig's Bavarian castles and
had lunch on the cathedral steps at Cologne, all sorts
(15:15):
of awesome founding things. Yeah, we're totally jealous. And I
love this note that she put at the bottom of
her first postcard. She says, PS, sorry about the spelling.
I'm a physics and engineering major. No worries with a
love for history and we love it. Jesse, you're sending
us international postcards. We we love it. But I think
this is the first time we've gotten this series of
(15:36):
them from somebody's grand tour, so it's pretty exciting. And
I posted the first batch we got on Facebook and
Twitter at misst in History the other day, so you
guys can live vicariously too. Yeah, And if you have
any more stories of your own travels and how you
have connected some information in our podcast to them, please
write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot
(15:59):
com or Sarah just mentioned looking us up on Twitter
at Miston History or on Facebook. And if you want
to learn a little bit more about Native American culture,
we have an article called or the Clovis the First American.
So you just learned about the first American city and
the podcast, and go read about the potential first American
culture in an article by searching for Clovis on our
(16:23):
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house
Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise Download it today
(16:43):
on iTunes,
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to bling a truck rewarding.
Late last year, we did an episode on the great
historical Finds of ten and shortly after that episode published
(00:23):
and from St. Louis emailed in a suggestion, and this
is what she said. She said, Well, pretty much everyone
knows about the astronomical and cultural sophistication of the Maya,
the Mississippian civilization seemed to be forgotten and rarely mentioned
in history classes, which is a shame. I wonder if
you'd consider doing an episode on Kahokia or your favorite
other Mississippian site. Fortunately, I hadn't missed Kahokia entirely. I
(00:47):
don't remember learning about it in history class. But right
before an emailed, actually, there was a National Geographic article
that had just published with pictures on the settlement and
lots of information about its history, and in part of
the article focused on how such an important cultural center
had been brushed aside and practically forgotten for centuries. Yeah,
(01:09):
not to mention bulldozed over in some cases. Yeah, but
we're gonna try to stop that from happening. We're gonna
try to at least introduce Kahokia to those of you
who haven't heard about it before. We're going to talk
about the culture and the city, and the archaeological efforts
to better understand the people who live there and the
reasons why they disappear. There's kind of a mystery behind
(01:29):
the whole thing too. But first we want to look
into who were these Mississippians. Anyway, around the year seven
hundred a d. A new kind of culture popped up
in the in the Mississippi Valley. Scholars differ on their
ideas though where exactly it came from. Some think that
it was the influence from northern Mexico, which introduced a
new agricultural techniques and religious practices. Others think it was
(01:52):
simply a major major climate change for the better combined
with new ways of thinking. Yeah, but regardless, the culture
quickly spread through out the American Midwest and the Southeast.
And though Mississippi and settlements were different. They'd have different
styles of homes and different styles of pottery, different arrowhead shapes,
they did have a few things in common. One of
(02:12):
those was an economy based on corn, and the other
was a religion based on the sun. But they're also
often defined by earth and flat top mounds, and we
have some of those mounds here in Ottawa. I think
I I visited maybe in fourth grade or so, and
you can go walk around the mounds and check them out. There,
pretty grass covered hills. It looks like today thousands of
(02:33):
years later. But the civilization in Cahokia, which is what
is today Collinsville, Illinois, just east of St. Louis, took
mound building to a whole new level, as as we're
going to find out soon. So how did this civilization
the city begin? Well, late woodland people probably first started
seriously settling the area around seven d a d. It
(02:54):
was prime real estate here in what was known as
the American Bottom, a floodplain of the Mississippi River. In
this area there were three rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri,
and the Illinois, and three ecosystems the Ozark Mountains, the Prairie,
and the Eastern woodlands. Yeah, so that provided the opportunity
to grow a lot of different kinds of crops, and
it attracted a lot of different kinds of animals. So
(03:15):
it was a good living if if you could, if
you could settle there, and people would have grown things
like squash and pumpkins and sunflowers, and plus they would
have eaten a lot of fish, and they would have
been able to travel easily on some of those smaller tributaries.
But like later Mississippian cultures, the economy was based on corn.
That was the bread and butter for for the Cohokian people.
(03:37):
And two things made this crop really successful at the time.
One was the development of the flint hoe, which made
farming easier, and then the other was a particularly nice
climate for a few hundred years there, and as production grew,
town started to form. And all of this food, all
of the surplus food, meant that time and resources could
(03:58):
be devoted to something other than agriculture, something more more advanced.
They could make crafts, and they could stockpile grain and
trade with other areas and in those crafts, and that
surplus corn meant that the people at Kokia traded with
tribes all over the Midwest and east. There archaeologists have
(04:18):
found shells from the Gulf copper from the Upper Great Lakes,
mica from southern Appalachia, and bountiful crops also left time
for massive building projects and the organizational infrastructure that was
really needed to execute these projects. Yeah. So that's where
Kochia comes in. It's a planned city. It's laid out
into zones for administration, ceremony, elite homes, regular neighborhoods, suburbs.
(04:44):
The large corn fields would have been outside of the
city on the floodplain, along with some smaller settlements, while
private homes would have kept gardens. Eventually, this settlement grew
to cover four thousand acres and it contained one dred
and twenty mounds, seventy or still preserved today. Some of
them were flat topped mounds which were often terraced and
topped with important buildings, and others were conical burial mounds. Yeah.
(05:06):
And just the logistics of these earthen mounds and building
them is really hard to fathom since we are so
used to heavy machinery being used for all excavation and
building projects. But there were no means of moving earth
other than carrying baskets full of it that would weigh
about fifty to sixty pounds, and so the earth would
(05:26):
come from borrow pits. They would carry the baskets to
the mounds under construction, and archaeologists estimate that the site's
largest mound, which is called Monks Mound, took fifteen million
baskets of earth to build over a period of of
hundreds of years probably. I mean, these weren't projects that
(05:47):
went up in in a few weeks or months, right,
And before you connect to Monks Mounds to some ancient religion,
it was actually named for French Trappist monks who garden
there in the eighteen hundreds. But regardless, it's definitely the
site's most impressive feature. Just few details about it. It's
the largest man made earthen mound in North America. It's
footprint is bigger than that of the largest of the
(06:07):
Great pyramids, and the chief would have lived or operated
from its peak and had full command of the land
as far as that I could see. Yeah, but the
plaza that contained the principal mounds is also really amazing.
It was artificially raised and leveled. It's forty acres, which
is equivalent to forty five football fields. That will at
least help out those of you from North America, I guess.
(06:28):
And it would have had room for marketplaces and ceremonial
sites in playing fields. So really the center of the
city and the whole plaza wasn't just left out on
the open plains though for for anybody to come in Sack.
It was surrounded by a log stockade that was two
miles long, and the temples and most of the elite
homes would have been built inside of that stockade protection.
(06:53):
There's also evidence of human sacrifice there at Mound seventy two,
where there are remains of fifty three women, four were
guys that looked like they were possibly executed, and one
very elite man who was surrounded by twenty thousand shell
beads arranged like a falcon. Yeah. And then there are
also some remains of five large woodhenges, and we're going
to talk about them a little bit more later. They
(07:15):
were made from red cedar, which was considered a sacred wood,
and they lined up with the rising sun at different
times of the year. And I think this is what
made and suggests this topic in the first place, because
we had mentioned the Woodhenge and Stonehenge, the Woodhenge at
Stonehenge in our Historical Finds podcasts. But the growth of
(07:35):
the city around ten fifty is the really stunning thing
about this story. Archaeologists call it the Big Bang because
it just seems like a boom town, like what we're
used to in the wild West, a town popping up
over night. Essentially. Yeah, it was marked with the formation
of a complex chiefdom, new house styles, new aerostyles, new
types of pottery, just a cultural explosion. And just one
(07:58):
hundred years after that cultural explosion and estimated twenty thousand
people were living in Kahokia, which makes it bigger than
London at the time. I feel like that comparison to
London keeps on popping up in in podcasts from around
the world. Yeah. Interestingly, though not all archaeologists really agree
on the size of Kahokia and its influence on the
(08:19):
rest of Mississippian culture. One thing they can agree on, though,
is that by about twelve fifty the city started to decline,
and it was a really slow decline. It wasn't like
some epidemic wiped out all twenty thousand people, but by
four hundred it was abandoned, and we have to ask
why how did that happen. It's possible that there was
(08:39):
some sort of climatic change that the climate got cooler
and drier, and just that little bit of difference in
the corn yield was enough to make the city and
its large population unsupportable. It might have brought the bloom
years to an end. But there might have been other
factors too, And and these aren't mutually exclusive. It's not
(09:01):
as though if you discount one you can't accept the other.
There might have been outbreaks of disease or warfare. For instance,
between eleven seventy five and twelve seventy five, the Stucades
were rebuilt several times, suggesting there was some kind of
trouble going on outside of Khokia. There might have been
environmental degregation too, because it was such a large settlement.
(09:24):
They were using a lot of wood for fuel and construction.
They were farming so heavily. There might have been agricultural effects, runoff, erosion,
that type of thing. And there might have just been
some kind of internal struggle, you know, the leader is
no longer accepted, or just problems inside of the city. Right. So,
with one or some combination of all of those factors,
(09:47):
by the time European settlers arrived, the original Cookian inhabitants
were long gone from the area. In fact, co Kia
is not actually a name connected to the people who
built the mounds. Probably comes as a surprise. Yeah, they
left no written language, so it instead comes from a
subtribe whose name meant wild geese that lived there in
the sixteen hundreds. They were members of the Illinois Confederacy,
(10:09):
a much later group of Native Americans who lived there.
But regardless of of who these people really were, the
mounds that they left behind were definitely stunning, so stunning
in fact, that settlers didn't think that they could have
been built by Native Americans. People thought that maybe Phoenicians
had been here and they had built the mounds, or
a tribe of Israel or Vikings, so all sorts of
(10:31):
pretty wild out their ideas, rather than just saying it
must have been some native people from a long time
ago who built these. The first guy to write a
report of the site was someone named Henry Breckenridge. He
was out exploring the prairie in eighteen eleven, and he
was really impressed by what he saw. He said, I
was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike which
(10:53):
is experienced in contemplating Egyptian pyramids. What a tremendous pile
of earth. But it seems like other people we didn't
really care, you know. He published this report, it didn't
get a big response. He finally got a little bit
of a response from President Thomas Jefferson. But later administrations
really ignored the site. And that's partly because it didn't
(11:14):
jive with ideas held at the time about Indians, ideas
that were crucial to relocating them westward, like that they
were nomads, they weren't good stewards of the land. Having
this massive city and evidence of people living in this
settled city for hundreds of years just didn't fit with
the announcement that was going out. Yeah, and because this
(11:36):
information was brushed aside. Basically, Monks Mound wasn't actually preserved
until and even then it was just preserved as a
place to sled basically a park, and a lot of
other nearby mounds were torn down of Kahokia, the site's
second largest mound was raised for filled dirt by horse
Radish farmers in nineteen thirty one, and later the site
(11:56):
held a gambling hall, a subdivision, and air field, a
pornographic drive in at various points, so clearly not much
respect for the historical importance of it. It wasn't until
the nineteen sixties, ironically, that the Interstate Highway program, threatening
to tear through the plaza, launched a real big archaeological
(12:17):
study of Khokia. And that's when researchers made the discovery
that this wasn't just a collection of mounds that served
some sort of ceremonial purpose. There was a big city
that had been here. They found evidence of homes and
pottery and trade and and things that suggested it was
a lot more than they thought. Yeah, and a doctor
(12:39):
Warren Witchery also theorized that the Woodhenge was a calendar
arcs of circles with wooden post set up to line
with the rising sun at certain times of the year.
So what we're looking at maybe America's first city. Yeah,
it's it's generally considered to be North America's first city.
And now it's only one of eight UNESCO World Heritage
Cultural Sites in the United States. I checked out the
(13:01):
list to see what some of the others are, and
they include Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty and Monticello,
places that receive so many visitors every year. Yet this
place is is still largely unknown, but Just because Kahokia
died out in fourteen hundred doesn't mean that other Mississippian
cultures went the same way. Others continued to thrive until
(13:24):
De Soto's arrival in Tampa in fifty nine, when, unfortunately,
after that many of them were killed off by disease
or driven off their land. One notable exception is the
Natchez people. They lasted well into the seventeen hundreds, and
I think we're eventually relocated further out west where where
their culture still lasts today. But after learning about Kahokia,
(13:47):
I really want to go visit it and and check
it out myself. Yeah, it's kind of sad. We talked
about these fascinating places and people every week, and we
so rarely go to them. We so really get to
visit them. But as you'll find with the listener mail
we've picked for this week, our listeners are a little luckier.
(14:10):
We have been delighted in the last couple of weeks
to start receiving several postcards from listener Jesse, who is
turning Europe right now and telling us all about it.
So I'm just gonna read one of her post cards.
She says, Dear Sarah Dublina. Hello, I am Jesse. I
just finished grad school at Dartmouth and I'm taking a
(14:32):
grand tour i'llah Lord Byron, though not as well funded,
around Europe. Fourteen countries and two months. I start my
travels in France, where I've been re listening to your
Catherine de Medici podcasts. I'm currently listening to The Green
Gallant while sunning myself along the Parisians in the tweeler
ree garden. Life is good. And she goes on to
tell us that she is heading to the Balkans towards
(14:54):
the end of her trip, and um, you know a
little bit more about the podcast. But we've got a
budget of postcards from her. It's pretty cool. We've got
one from first Side today, one from Amsterdam, a few
from Germany. She went to see Ludwig's Bavarian castles and
had lunch on the cathedral steps at Cologne, all sorts
(15:15):
of awesome founding things. Yeah, we're totally jealous. And I
love this note that she put at the bottom of
her first postcard. She says, PS, sorry about the spelling.
I'm a physics and engineering major. No worries with a
love for history and we love it. Jesse, you're sending
us international postcards. We we love it. But I think
this is the first time we've gotten this series of
(15:36):
them from somebody's grand tour, so it's pretty exciting. And
I posted the first batch we got on Facebook and
Twitter at misst in History the other day, so you
guys can live vicariously too. Yeah, And if you have
any more stories of your own travels and how you
have connected some information in our podcast to them, please
write us at History podcast at how stuff works dot
(15:59):
com or Sarah just mentioned looking us up on Twitter
at Miston History or on Facebook. And if you want
to learn a little bit more about Native American culture,
we have an article called or the Clovis the First American.
So you just learned about the first American city and
the podcast, and go read about the potential first American
culture in an article by searching for Clovis on our
(16:23):
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. Be
sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from
the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore
the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house
Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise Download it today
(16:43):
on iTunes,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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