Overview
The Cahokia site is a Mississippian culture site located in Collinsville, Illinois, about thirteen miles from St. Louis, Missouri, and was occupied from around AD 800-1350. Estimates of the population at its height range from 10,000 to 25,000 people.

Economy & Food Subsistence
Cahokia, like almost all Mississippian cultural sites, was primarily driven maize agriculture. This rich soil of the American Bottom Region helped produce widespread cultivation of maize and other crops, such as beans and squash, as well as “hunting, fishing, and exploiting migrating waterfowl” (Fagan 2005:188). Cahokia was partly able to become such a dominating city through the ability to take advantage of a complex trade network connecting together the policies and sites of the Mississippian world. Cahokia, for example, “owed some of its importance to the manufacture and trading of local salt and chert” (Fagan 2005:191), and was a major trading center from which  “artifacts traveled over a distance of as much as 430 miles” (Fagan 2004:469).

Social Organization
Cahokia had eighty large earthen mounds, several plazas,and a two-mile long palisade around the central part of the site (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site).This central precinct consisted of a large plaza defined on the edges by 18 mounds “surrounded by a palisade constructed through an active residential zone” (Lewis and Stout 1998:203). Within these walls were the residential areas of the elites and the hub of “economic exchange, of craft production, and of the political domination of a large region” (Lewis and Stout 1998:203). Control over the exchange network meant control over a “limited set of raw materials and finished artifacts marked by recognizable iconographies” making the controller powerful in his ability to redistribute the limited goods (Lewis and Stout 1998:43).

Ideology
One burial in the small ridge topped mound 72 at Cahokia provides us evidence of a burial of a very important person. The “falcon warrior”, as he is called, was buried on top of a bed of thousands of shells in the shape of a bird figure, and was found with several hundred of arrowheads of several distinct variations and materials associated with groups in places as far away as “Oklahoma, Tennessee,southern Illinois, and Wisconsin” (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site). This exchange network connecting Cahokia and the rest of the Mississippian world helped to spread the common symbolic themes and motifs that have become part of the shared ideology making up what archaeologists have dubbed, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.