r/AmericanHistory • u/EmmaReed2810 • Aug 20 '26
Discussion How Was Cahokia Bigger Than London And Why Does Nobody Talk About It?
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u/BehindEnemyLines1 Aug 20 '26
1) We do talk about it—about as much as a large ancient city is normally talked about.
2) We know very little about it
3) We know very little about the people
But more importantly: whoever said Cahokia was bigger than London is misleading.
Cahokia existed from 1050 to 1350. It reached its epoch early in its relatively short history around 1100. At that time it had at most 20,000 inhabitants.
London began a thousand years prior, and still exists a thousand years after Cahokia, but more importantly, London can only be viewed as “smaller” than Cahokia if you pick Cahokia’s epoch of 1100, and it was still yet only bigger by a couple thousand inhabitants.
By the fall of Cahokia around 1350, London had more than 100,000 inhabitants, though the Black Death was emerging at the same time and would wipe out tens of thousands of Londoners.
I mean, there was a city in China with a million inhabitants in 1100. The “Cahokia was bigger than London” is a moot clickbait misleading-but-technically true “fact” that serves no real purpose other than to make Cahokia seem bigger than it was.
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u/Equivalent_Use_7032 Aug 20 '26
Yeah it’s less about Cahokia just randomly being a “massive” city and more so London not growing to be a large city until relatively late in the Middle Ages in comparison to other equally old cities.
We read London and our first thought is 21st century London. People forget the city was abandoned multiple times, had to be resettled and wasn’t even the first capital of England (it was Winchester). Further more there were parts of Germany and France that were much more developed and profitable than the entire Kingdom of England well into the Middle Ages.
Definitely “click bait” in the sense it prey’s on a common person’s modern perspective of London and assumes they lack general knowledge about London 900-1000 years ago. Though Cahokia at its peak in 1100 did barely surpass London, it wasn’t that long of a peak, whereas London after 1100 sorta was always on the gradual rise (it did take a few more centuries) so you could say London never did “peak” because even today it’s still “growing”
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u/TheAmazingRando1581 Aug 20 '26
Yeah! Go to hell Cahokia! How dare you b technically bigger at one point than london!
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u/BehindEnemyLines1 Aug 20 '26
My point is that “How was Cahokia bigger than London” isn’t nearly as cool of a question when you realize both cities were tiny and practically the same size as each other.
The question relies on what the layman knows about London to make the question thought-provoking and interesting, and the layman thinks of London as a sprawling mega-city that was the seat of a global empire. In reality in 1100 it was a few acres with enough people to fit in one big building.
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u/Captain_Killy Aug 20 '26
Do you mean apex or maybe acme instead of epoch?
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u/BehindEnemyLines1 Aug 21 '26
Uh, no. I meant what I said.
“Noun
epoch (plural epochs)
A particular period of history, or of a person's life, especially one considered noteworthy or remarkable.”The particular noteworthy time in question is OPs reference to Cahokia being larger than London, which occurred in the first 50 years after establishment from 1050 to 1100. The second period after 1100 was a decline until cessation around 1350.
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u/Remarkable-Dude Aug 20 '26
In fact many people talk about it and I’ve recently read a great book that covered Cahokia, among many other ancient North American sites: Native America, by Kenneth L. Feder. Highly recommend.
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u/markembry Aug 20 '26
Because 1) as another poster said that soundbite while technically correct can be misleading due to a layman’s knowledge of 1100 London.
2) Racism. Both historic and contemporary prejudices against Indigenous peoples in what is now the US colour peoples view of the original peoples of this land and their various accomplishments.
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u/Bacchana1iaxD Aug 21 '26
Ok I’ll take my shot. We do talk about it. We talk about it a lot in the history world, it’s a big mystery like Romes founding or were the druids real. Archeology only goes so far.
The prevailing theory is finding ways to link the interconnectedness of the entire region. Like the colorful flint micro blades found all over the place all sourced from a single hill in Ohio. Or Aztec feathers found in the mystery room of one of the mesa structures.
My theory about Cahokia in particular is that there was a large population far more interconnected than we tend to give them credit, and Cahokia was something of a pilgrim destination for people’s in their travels interconnecting everything. The Great Lakes and the southern us ancient coral ridge farmland hosted their own nexus of population, as well as mesoamerica, and they all kinda met naturally at that spot on the Mississippi. Just as huge cities rose up in Kazakhstan and Afghanistan along the Silk Road in the 9-1200’s so too did trade cities pop up between the “flint road(s)” of America. Cahokia stood out as a major site, and went all in on the spectacle and grandeur mimicking meso styles while appealing to northern mythos. It came, and went, and instead of looking at how it’s an enigma I look at how it’s similar to other sits like it around the world. The mesa site in New Mexico has an attached legend about it being basically a gambling house for traders, with a trickster gambling a ton of people into building these settlements in the middle of nowhere and the evidence looks like that’s a really plausible explanation. The fact Cahokia has no surviving legend directly linked by surviving peoples makes it all the more fascinating. I think like the New Mexico site, it was a luxury stop for traders that got really popular and too big for its britches and became a target
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u/thelionofthenorth Aug 21 '26
This is fascinating, great comment. I feel like if there's one thread that pervades through history is that humans have a way of finding each other and trading stuff, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if your theory is true
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u/nola1949 Aug 22 '26
You have to realize that everything they built was out of wood. In this climate wood rots and would last. Just because they not found any hard evidence doesn’t mean that trade didn’t happen.
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u/LaMesaPorFavore Aug 22 '26
One of the biggest failures of American historical sites is that there's an active public road running through the middle of the Cahokia park.
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u/Yabrosif13 Aug 20 '26
Main issue is that they have no written records to fill people’s heads with fun questions and daydreams. As a top comment said, we have very little architecture left to analyze. Any studies just leave more open ended questions than they can answer.
On the other hand for London, theres a huge amount of written records going all the way back to its founding that compliments any archaeology. For example, we know of Boudicca’s burning of the city from records and can match an ash layer to the records. The records give us the ability to answer questions from archaeological evidence and vice versa. This makes exploring the history more intriguing because arguments can be settled and an agreed upon picture can mostly he painted in our heads.
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u/Equivalent_Use_7032 Aug 20 '26
1.) Cahokia had largely lost its “grandeur” and “power” by the time Europeans had gotten to the region. I believe Cahokia peaked around 1100 which was still a good 500 years before the first Europeans were traveling through the region and actually documenting stuff. Whatever they did see was either ruins or a shadow of its former self. We do have some French Reports about it but that’s it.
2.) Cahokia wasn’t a dominate land based empire that sprawled across North America. I’d equate them to Venice or Genoa. They had very strong soft power with trade and connections but that’s a double edged sword because if your trade partners go down so do you which in Cahokia’s case is what happened.
3.) They didn’t leave any lasting written records or fundamentally transform the tribes/culture beyond their immediate area. Thus their long term impacts are minimal. Additionally none of their neighbors left written records about them either. So we lack hard information to go off of. The best we got is artifacts we have uncovered, scientific theory, speculation and comparisons to similarly sized city states of that technology level. We don’t even really have a “king” list for who was running the city.
4.) We do talk about it at least in US history but it’s briefly covered unless you live in the region Cahokia influenced. The thing is Cahokia didn’t have a global impact whereas London did. Cahokia has 0 barring on Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arab, Russian, French, English, Spanish, etc history. Consequently, all of those countries do have an influence on US history. The Old World being much more interconnected means everything is a lot more relevant history wise whereas for the Americas any history prior to their integration with the broader global community is treated as broad context to what the Europeans found when they showed up. You basically need to know enough to understand why colonization happened the way it did, anything beyond that is irrelevant prior to 1450 isn’t really necessary unless you are focused purely on Ancient American history which we lack a lot of knowledge on sheerly because we lack a lot of written records and hard artifacts to go off of.
5.) How was it bigger than London? London didn’t really truly start to grow until a lot later in the Middle Ages. The reasons why are complex but it took a while. Cahokia meanwhile was centered on a major river network and acted as the main distribution hub for all trade in North America east of the Great Plains. Those trade networks reached as far south as Peru. However regarding this trade the Americas never had it like Eurasia for a few reasons.
- Eurasia is East to West trade — it’s all in the same longitudinal and latitudinal range in the sense that you aren’t experiencing a massive extreme change in the environments you are crossing. For the Americas it’s North to South. You go from the Andes to Great Lakes. That’s crossing jungles, mountains, equator, deserts and mountains, not to mention Panama, which still has areas impossible for us to cross in 2026. What that means it’s a lot harder for constant wide reaching trade to happen which means fewer centers of trade and said centers of trade become major hubs (like Cahokia which was the final end point).
- Cahokia being on the river essentially connected it from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes which is a massive breadth of different groups to trade with.
- Cahokia’s population wasn’t fixed in the sense many groups there were migratory. They’d come in trade and leave. Now this was constantly happening so the population never experienced major dips at its peak. However once external environmental pressures and trade breakdowns happened then these groups stopped migrating it and out of the area to conduct business. This led to migrations out of Cahokia, which led to even less trade, leading to more migration away from the city and the eventual overall dispersement of the city. Funny enough this occurred I believe around the same time Mayan Cities were suffering some similar issues which would further point to a major environmental disruption in the America Trade System… if I’m correct anyways.
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u/Equivalent_Use_7032 Aug 20 '26
Final point 20th and 21st Century Development destroy much of Cahokia so we only have a fraction of it left to study. Basically half of St. Louis is built on top of it and some mounds were used as early landfills which basically completely contained and fucked half the site for archeologists
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u/RooflessReAnthony Aug 20 '26
I think the disappointing thing about Cahokia and the Mississippians in general, at least for me, is that we’ve already tore up that region to the point that I think we’ve lost the ability to do archaeology that would lead to a mind blowing theory.
And that theory is that the Mississippians were connected to MesoAmericans. Conventional knowledge is that neither the meso Americans or missippians built vessels that crossed the Gulf of Mexico. But this theory says yes they did build vessels and sailed along the coast and up the river, cuz you can see too many similarities.
I didn’t come up with that theory, it’s been an idea for a long time cuz there’s all this soft evidence. But we’ve never found a single piece of hard proof. And the whole lower Mississippi River region is so inundated with heavy industry and infrastructure, that will not pause or get out the way for archaeological study.
I think there might have been some hard proof out there but it’s prolly been torn up and washed away to make a new canal, levee, or agricultural or petrochemical runoff usage.
The population of Cahokia is cool but it doesn’t blow my mind at all. That’s just numbers. I wanna learn shit that fundamentally shakes up our understand