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The Mighty Cahokia Empire Below St. Louis
You’d never guess that the bustling streets of St. Louis once sat atop North America’s greatest ancient metropolis. At its apex around 1100 CE, the city covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Imagine a city larger than London at the time, complete with sophisticated urban planning and mathematical precision that would make modern engineers jealous. This year’s excavations found multiple drill bits, microdrills, pottery sherds, and more. The group also found differentiating soil types, possibly pointing to multiple structures being built in the same spot, one over another. What’s really mind-blowing is that if the highest population estimates are correct, Cahokia was larger than any subsequent city in the United States until the 1780s, when Philadelphia’s population grew beyond 40,000. The remnants of this incredible civilization now rest just eight miles from downtown St. Louis, mostly forgotten except by archaeologists who know they’re standing on something truly extraordinary. “Cahokia is the largest archaeological site in North America, but only about 1% of it has been excavated, so there’s much about the site we don’t know,” Rankin said.
Cincinnati’s Vanished Mound Builder Legacy
The rolling hills around Cincinnati aren’t all natural – many once held the sacred burial mounds of the Adena and Hopewell cultures, built between 800 BC and 500 AD. According to William C. Mills, former Curator of Archaeology (and later Director) of the Ohio Historical Society, there used to be 132 mounds and 28 earthen enclosures in Franklin County. Very few of these have survived the depredations of historic farming and more recent development across the county. It’s heartbreaking to think about what we’ve lost – imagine walking through downtown Cincinnati knowing that it’s estimated that Ohio used to be home to an estimated 10,000 earthworks as a result of the work of these two cultures. Columbus, Cincinnati, the Plains, and other cities are known to have been built on ancient indigenous earthen structures, destroying them in the process. Today, less than 1,000 mounds survive, and most are smaller satellite mounds, small burial mounds, or remnants of mounds that have been regraded from agriculture or house building. These weren’t just random piles of dirt – the huge Hopewell squares and circles point to events in the cycles of the sun and moon. Moreover, they are built with mathematical precision using a common unit of measure, the Hopewell Measurement Unit (HMU) of 1,054 feet. Early settlers dismissed them as “Indian burial grounds,” not realizing they were destroying astronomical observatories that rivaled Stonehenge in their sophistication.
Santa Fe’s Hidden Puebloan Foundations
Walking through Santa Fe’s adobe-lined streets, you’re literally treading on centuries of continuous Indigenous occupation. The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, had established sophisticated settlements in this area long before Spanish colonizers arrived in 1610. These weren’t simple villages but complex communities with multi-story buildings, intricate irrigation systems, and extensive trade networks that stretched across the Southwest. What makes Santa Fe unique is that unlike many other American cities, the Indigenous presence never really ended – it just got buried under layers of colonial and modern development. Construction crews regularly unearth pottery shards, stone tools, and evidence of ancient structures during routine building projects. The downtown plaza, now filled with tourists and street vendors, sits atop what archaeologists believe was a major gathering place for multiple Pueblo groups. You can still see the influence of these ancient builders in Santa Fe’s distinctive architecture, though most visitors don’t realize they’re experiencing a design aesthetic that’s over a thousand years old.
Fort Myers and the Shell Mound Builders
The sunny beaches of Fort Myers hide one of Florida’s most impressive ancient engineering feats – the shell mounds of the Calusa people. These weren’t accidental garbage dumps but carefully constructed artificial islands and ceremonial centers built entirely from oyster shells, clam shells, and other marine refuse over thousands of years. The Calusa were unlike most Native American groups because they were hunter-gatherers who never adopted agriculture, yet still developed a complex chiefdom society that controlled most of South Florida. Mound Key, located in Estero Bay just south of Fort Myers, served as their capital for over 2,000 years and once rose 30 feet above the water. Spanish explorers described it as a bustling city with hundreds of residents living in houses built on stilts above the shell foundations. The Calusa were master engineers who created an entire landscape of canals, artificial islands, and waterways that allowed them to navigate the treacherous waters of the Everglades. Today, most visitors to Fort Myers have no idea they’re in the heart of what was once one of North America’s most sophisticated maritime civilizations.
Nashville’s Mississippian Secrets
Nashville’s famous music scene plays out above the remains of another kind of cultural hub – the ceremonial centers of the Mississippian people who thrived here from 900 to 1450 CE. These builders created massive earthen pyramids that would have dominated the landscape, some reaching heights of 100 feet or more. The Sulphur Dell area, once home to Nashville’s beloved baseball stadium, was built directly on top of a major Mississippian settlement complete with plaza areas, burial mounds, and residential districts. What’s fascinating is that the Mississippian culture developed many of the same urban planning concepts we use today – they had distinct residential neighborhoods, commercial areas, and ceremonial districts all laid out in organized patterns. The Cumberland River provided the same advantages then as it does now: transportation, trade routes, and rich bottomland for agriculture. Many of Nashville’s hills aren’t natural features but ancient temple mounds that were later farmed flat by European settlers who had no idea what they were destroying. When you’re walking through downtown Nashville today, you’re following pathways that Indigenous people used for over five centuries.
Manhattan’s Lenape Trading Ground
Before it was the concrete jungle we know today, Manhattan was a carefully managed landscape shaped by the Lenape people for thousands of years. Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan sits where one of their major fishing and trading sites once thrived. The Lenape weren’t simply living off the land – they were actively shaping it through controlled burns, selective harvesting, and sophisticated resource management that made the island incredibly productive. What we think of as “natural” Manhattan was actually a cultural landscape as carefully designed as Central Park, but with different goals in mind. The original Lenape name for Manhattan was “Mannahatta,” meaning “island of many hills,” and those hills were connected by well-worn trails that became many of today’s major streets. Broadway follows an ancient Lenape trade route called the Wickquasgeck Trail that connected different settlements across the island. Dutch and English colonizers didn’t find an empty wilderness – they found a homeland that had been carefully tended and improved by its inhabitants for millennia. Today, every time someone digs a foundation in Lower Manhattan, they’re disturbing archaeological layers that tell the story of America’s first urban planners.
Phoenix’s Canal-Building Pioneers
Long before Phoenix became a sprawling desert metropolis, the Hohokam people turned this seemingly inhospitable landscape into one of the most productive agricultural regions in North America. Between 300 and 1450 CE, they built over 600 miles of irrigation canals that brought water from the Salt and Gila Rivers to fields that stretched for miles across the valley. These weren’t simple ditches but sophisticated waterways with precise gradients, distribution systems, and maintenance protocols that kept them functioning for over a thousand years. What’s remarkable is that many of Phoenix’s modern canals follow the exact same routes as the ancient Hohokam channels – proving that these early engineers had figured out the optimal way to move water across this terrain centuries ago. The Pueblo Grande ruins near Sky Harbor Airport represent just a tiny fraction of what once existed here. The Hohokam built ball courts similar to those found in Mexico, suggesting they were part of a vast trade network that connected the American Southwest with Mesoamerica. When you fly into Phoenix today and see the geometric patterns of irrigation spreading across the valley, you’re looking at a system that has its roots in Indigenous engineering that’s over 1,500 years old.
Tampa Bay’s Temple Mound Mysteries
The modern city of Tampa sprawls across what was once the domain of the Tocobaga people, who built impressive temple mounds and ceremonial centers throughout the Tampa Bay area from about 900 to 1600 CE. The Safety Harbor Site at Philippe Park contains the remnants of their most important ceremonial complex, including platform mounds that once supported temples and chiefs’ houses overlooking the bay. These weren’t isolated communities but part of a sophisticated political system that controlled trade routes throughout the Tampa Bay region and beyond. The Tocobaga were skilled navigators who used large dugout canoes to travel throughout Florida’s interconnected waterways, trading with groups as far away as the Great Lakes and Mexico. Spanish explorers who arrived in the 1500s described encountering a well-organized society with permanent towns, complex political hierarchies, and impressive architectural achievements. Unfortunately, European diseases and slave raids decimated the Tocobaga population within a few generations, leaving behind only their mounds and the faint outlines of their settlements. Today, suburban Tampa has grown over most of these sites, though careful observers can still spot the subtle rises and depressions that mark where ancient plazas and mounds once stood.
Pittsburgh’s Lost River Towns
Pittsburgh’s famous three rivers – the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio – made it a natural hub for the Indigenous people who lived here long before European settlers arrived. The Monongahela culture, which flourished from about 1050 to 1600 CE, built circular villages throughout the river valleys that would eventually become Pittsburgh’s industrial heartland. These settlements were strategically placed on river terraces that provided both protection from flooding and easy access to transportation routes. What sets the Monongahela culture apart is that they seemed to disappear completely before European contact, leaving behind only archaeological traces of their sophisticated society. Some archaeologists think they migrated south and became part of other tribal groups, while others believe they fell victim to climate change or warfare with neighboring peoples. Their villages were surrounded by wooden palisades and contained circular houses arranged around central plazas – a layout that maximized both defense and community interaction. Today, Pittsburgh’s industrial sites and urban neighborhoods have buried most evidence of these ancient communities, though archaeologists occasionally uncover traces of Monongahela settlements during construction projects. The irony is that Pittsburgh became a major transportation and industrial center for exactly the same reasons that attracted Indigenous people here centuries earlier – the convergence of major rivers in a landscape rich with natural resources.
Houston’s Karankawa Coastal Empire
Houston occupies the land of ancient civilizations. The Atakapa, Akokisa, Deadose, and the better-known Karankawa lived their days here with family and friends, as we do today. As far back as 13,000 years ago, they traded goods with people in Mexico City and Central America. What most Houstonians don’t realize is that their city sits on shell middens and burial sites that stretch back thousands of years along Galveston Bay. The area was once a bustling village where hundreds of Karankawa people gathered each year during the cooler months to live and fish. Those ancestors left behind tens of thousands of pottery sherds, arrowheads, tools fashioned from shells, and more. The port commissioned Ricklis’ firm to lead the archaeological testing and recovery to fulfill state and federal laws, and before the sale, he and his colleagues recovered more than 39,000 Karankawa artifacts, a fraction of what they say is still there. The Karankawa weren’t the “savage cannibals” that Texas history books portrayed them as – they were sophisticated coastal people who developed one of North America’s most successful maritime cultures. After centuries of colonial violence, the Karankawa have endured to this day. For decades, the dominant culture has said that the Karankawa savages and cannibals, as well as having gone “extinct” by the end of the 19th century. To survive, families hid their identities – but in recent decades more families have felt comfortable talking about their culture and history in public. Houston teems with the artifacts of Native ancestors. Because there is so much new construction in Houston, there are necessarily more archaeological digs. Digs in Houston have unearthed stone tools, an indication of trade with other regions, since stone is not found in Houston and comes from the Edwards Plateau and beyond.
What’s your city hiding beneath its streets? Have you ever wondered what stories your local construction crews might be unknowingly disturbing with every foundation they dig?
Besides founding Festivaltopia, Luca is the co founder of trib, an art and fashion collectiv you find on several regional events and online. Also he is part of the management board at HORiZONTE, a group travel provider in Germany.
