History of the World podcast · Chris Hasler

Vol 4 Ep 92 - Mississippian culture

·49 min·3 clips

Monks Mound is the largest prehistoric earthen structure in the Americas.

The Mississippian culture is presented as a sophisticated, hard-to-pin-down civilisation of pre-Columbian America. It is dated from around 800 CE to the European colonization of North America. The narration pauses on the comparison problem right away. European and Asian histories often get told as a tidy sequence, but that frame does not fit every society. The episode argues that ancient America needs a different lens. It introduces towering earthen pyramids in what would become the United States, then widens out to busy cities, complex social structures, detailed artistry, and a vivid spiritual world. Cahokia sits at the heart of the story. The city is presented as a major urban centre of the Middle Mississippian region. At its peak, it may have held as many as 20,000 people. That would have made it the largest city north of Mesoamerica in the ancient world. The episode also dwells on the scale of its built environment. Cahokia included the largest man-made structure in what is now the United States. Wooden posts were arranged in a circle that likely worked as a solar calendar, a Woodhenge-like marker for the seasons and planting cycle. The city was not open ground either. Palisades and guard towers show that protection was part of urban life. The wider river world of the Mississippi and the Ohio placed Cahokia inside a larger network of movement and connection. By the end, the episode treats Cahokia as a lost but fully formed civilisation, one without a surviving written name and with a legacy that rises from the soil of Illinois.

As heard by us

Cahokia is restored here as a major city, not a footnote.

The episode gives Cahokia and the Mississippian world their proper scale, making room for earthen pyramids, a large urban center, a solar calendar, and a society shaped by farming and belief.

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Why you'd press play

You want ancient America treated as a major civilization, not a side note.

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