In southern Illinois in Collinsville, the largest prehistoric settlement north of Mexico can be found. This is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site which is 4,000 acres. How Cahokia began and ended to this day is still considered a mystery. The people of Cahokia built more thank 120 earth mounds as landmarks, tombs, and ceremonial platforms. The largest of these mounds is Monks Mound. It covers more than 14 acres, and it once supported a 5,000-square-foot temple on top. Monks Mound is a flat top dirt pyramid which originally took between 15 and 20 billion pounds of soil to construct. This mound is bigger than and of the three great pyramids in Giza, Egypt. Today, Monks Mound has four distinct terraces. It is believed that the building at the summit was the residence for the leader of Cahokia. At the top of Monks Mound, a ruler could see nearly all of Cahokia. It would also be considered a symbol of authority, the governing ruler towering above all of the rest of the city. The amount of man hours needed to construct such a structure must have been astronomical. It is believed that Monks Mound was constructed in various phases over a two to three hundred period. The Cahokians did not have a written language to accompany their spoken one. By the time European settlers arrived in America, Cahokia was all but deserted. The name for Monks Mound comes from the French monks who settled there in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Without any record keeping, it is hard for some to believe that Cahokia possessed an organized government. Writing is generally seen as a prerequisite to the kind of record keeping needed for an organized government. Cahokia was an agricultural state and it crumbled nearly 700 years ago. One possible reason is malnutrition. Cahokian's diets lacked protein. Cahokia is believed to not have had many domestic animals so it would have been much harder for them to obtain sources of protein. Their main…
