Academic Reading — Test 164

Reading passage

Long before European ships reached the shores of the Americas, a remarkable city flourished on the floodplain of the Mississippi River, near the site of present-day St Louis. Known to archaeologists as Cahokia, this settlement was the largest urban centre north of Mexico in the pre-Columbian era. At its height, around the year 1100, Cahokia may have housed a population of between ten and twenty thousand people, a figure that would not be matched by any city in what is now the United States until Philadelphia surpassed it in the late eighteenth century. The people who built and inhabited Cahokia left no written records, so almost everything understood about their society has been reconstructed by archaeologists from the physical traces they left behind in the earth. The most striking of these traces are the earthen mounds that gave the culture its modern name. More than one hundred and twenty mounds were raised across the wider Cahokia area, although many have since been damaged or destroyed by farming and construction. These structures were not burial heaps alone; they served a variety of purposes. Some supported the dwellings of important individuals, others provided platforms for ceremonies, and a number did indeed contain human remains. The mounds were constructed entirely without the aid of draught animals, wheeled vehicles or metal tools. Labourers carried earth in woven baskets, basket by basket, and deposited it layer upon layer. The scale of this effort was immense: the largest structure, now called Monks Mound, required an estimated fourteen million baskets of soil and rises in a series of terraces to a height of roughly thirty metres, covering a base larger than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Monks Mound dominated a central plaza, an open, deliberately levelled space where the community is thought to have gathered. The name of the mound has nothing to do with the original inhabitants; it derives from a community of French Trappist monks who lived nearby in the early nineteenth century and cultivated gardens on its terraces. At the summit of the mound once stood a large timber building, probably the residence of a paramount ruler or the setting for important rituals. Surrounding the central precinct was a substantial wooden palisade, a defensive wall that was rebuilt several times. The presence of this wall suggests that the threat of conflict was a genuine concern for the city's inhabitants, even though no direct account of warfare survives. Cahokian society was clearly stratified, with sharp distinctions between elite and ordinary people. The clearest evidence comes from a burial discovered within one of the mounds, where a high-ranking man was laid to rest on a platform of thousands of shell beads arranged in the shape of a bird. Around him were buried other individuals, along with offerings of finely worked arrowheads and sheets of mica brought from distant regions. Some of those accompanying him appear to have been sacrificed, a practice that points to the considerable power held by the ruling class. The presence of materials such as copper from the Great Lakes and marine shells from the Gulf coast also reveals that Cahokia sat at the centre of a wide trading network that reached across much of the continent. The economy that sustained this population rested largely on the cultivation of maize, a crop that had spread northwards over preceding centuries. Reliable harvests of maize, supplemented by the gathering of wild plants and by hunting, allowed a dense population to settle in one place. Yet the very success of this system may have contained the seeds of its decline. By around 1350, Cahokia had been almost completely abandoned, and the reasons remain a subject of debate. Researchers have proposed a combination of factors, including the exhaustion of soils, the felling of nearby forests for fuel and building timber, flooding, and perhaps internal political tension. No single cause has been firmly established, and it is likely that several pressures acted together over many decades rather than any sudden catastrophe. Today the heart of the ancient city is preserved as a protected historic site, and in 1982 it was recognised by an international body for its outstanding cultural value. For many visitors, the survival of these grass-covered mounds is a powerful reminder that complex, organised societies existed across North America long before written history reached the continent. The study of Cahokia continues to reshape ideas about the scale and sophistication of indigenous civilisations, and each season of excavation adds detail to a picture that is still far from complete.