Lost city dubbed 'Atlantis of the land' bigger than London and filled with mass graves

An ancient city - lost in mysterious circumstances - existed before America was founded.

The vanished city had a population bigger than London and is filled with filled with mass graves, a city centre and a 100 acre mound.

Cahokia is in many ways the Atlantis of the land. Described as “a total orphan – a lost city in every sense" this was a thriving metropolis in what is now Mississippi in 1350, with a population akin to London and Paris. Then, before Christopher Columbus arrived on America’s shores, it was deserted by its native city dwellers.

“Cahokia is definitely an underplayed story,” professor emeritus of archaeology at Northwestern University James Brown told The Guardian.

“You’d have to go to the valley of Mexico to see anything comparable to this place. It’s a total orphan – a lost city in every sense.”

Reaching its population height in about 1100, the population shrank and disappeared by 1350. Tales of Cahokia do not even appear in Native American folklore and oral histories, Emerson said. “Apparently what happened in Cahokia left a bad taste in people’s minds.”

Eight miles from present-day St Louis, the Mississippians, a group of Native Americans who occupied much of the US from the state river to the Atlantic, built Cahokia.

It was a highly sophisticated city. A third of the population was “not from Cahokia, but somewhere else” said Thomas Emerson, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois.

Compared to Manhattan in its diversity, its residents came from all over the region - Natchez, the Pensacola, the Choctaw, the Ofo.

Emerson said: “A lot of the world is still relating in terms of cowboys and Indians, and feathers and teepees. But in AD1000, from the beginning, [a city is] laid on a specific plan. It doesn’t grow into a plan, it starts as a plan. And they created the most massive earthen mound in North America. Where does that come from?”

As well as farmers, traders and hunters, pottery makers and artists, the Cahokians were also urban planners, who used astronomical alignments to build a city of 10-20,000 people, a town centre with public plazas and hand-built earthen mounds. The largest of these mounds was 100 feet tall and covered 14 acres and can still be seen today.

It had 120 earthen mounds built by hand - with the builders digging up and stacking 55 million cubic feet of earth using hand-woven baskets over a few decades.

A mass burial site was also unearthed filled with likely human sacrifices. The corpses were mainly young women, strangled or bled out. Four men were found with their hands cut off. Another burial pit was filled with men clubbed to death.

Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, was the first to discover the then-abandoned Cahokia in 1540. Emerson said as Cahokia was built on a flood plain it was most likely intended to double as a “pilgrimage city”, where all Mississippians could gather for religious events.

He said: “It might’ve been a good area to explore but not so good to live in. But then something changed around AD1000, and it became this major centre. Most of the change has nothing to do with the economy, but what we broadly call religion.”

Cahokia’s largest mound would have been where the city’s political and spiritual leaders met and held ceremonies.

Most of the Mississippians lived on the other side of the centre in single room dwellings 15 ft long and 12 ft wide, with wooden-post walls covered with mats and a thatched roof.

The homes were linked by a network of paths much like modern day streets.

Brown said: “There was a belief that what went on on Earth also went on in the spirit world, and vice versa. So once you went inside these sacred protocols, everything had to be very precise.”

A tall post outside the religious centre was used to measure the summer and winter solstice.

When excavations began in 1961, scholars found artistic stone and ceramic figurines and a small copper workshop.

Brown said: “Inside was a fireplace with coals, where copper could be pounded out and annealed. They pounded it out, heated it to allow the crystals in the cooper to realign, and when they quenched this in water, you’d have something that resembled an ornament, a bead.”

As Cahokia was never victim of a war or invasion, as evidenced by the lack of weapons found - it seemed the violence came from within.

It’s interesting,” Emerson said. “At Cahokia the danger is from the people on top; not other people [from other tribes or locations] attacking you.”

William Iseminger, archaeologist and assistant manager at Cahokia Mounds, disagrees.

He said there must have been some threat as it was rebuilt three times between 1175 and 1275.

Iseminger said: “Perhaps they never were attacked, but the threat was there and the leaders felt the need to expend a tremendous amount of time, labour and material to protect the central ceremonial precinct.”