In the year 1050 CE, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in what is now southern Illinois, there was a city.
Not a village. Not a settlement. A city — with a population of somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people, monumental public architecture, a sophisticated agricultural system, and trade networks spanning from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. By area and by population, it was larger than London at that time.
It was called Cahokia.
I had never heard of it until a few years ago.
I’m a researcher by training. I spent decades in universities. I’ve written books anchored in historical research and documentation. And I encountered Cahokia for the first time in my fifties. I couldn’t believe such a thing existed in the U.S. — several ancient civilizations along the Mississippi River, sophisticated societies with pyramids and mounds, essentially invisible in the education most of us received. A couple of years ago my wife and I decided it was time to go see them for ourselves, and we drove out in our camper van.
That trip changed how I thought about everything I was writing.
When I started working on a YA series that would become The Temporal Witnesses — a story I originally wrote as a birthday gift for my daughter Camila. In the series, two Seattle teenagers named Cuchu and Matias, students at Nathan Hale High School, go on time-travel adventures to learn about ancient civilizations and to prevent the erasure of history in the current U.S. education landscape. After standing on the ground at Cahokia, I knew I had to include it in the story.
What Cahokia actually was
The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site sits eight miles east of St. Louis. It contains 80 surviving earthen mounds — the remnants of a city that, at its peak in the eleventh century, was the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico.
The largest structure, Monks Mound, covers more ground than the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was built in stages over 300 years, entirely by hand, without metal tools or draft animals. The base covers 14 acres. The summit stands 100 feet above the surrounding plain.
The city was laid out on a cardinal grid. The central plaza was larger than 40 football fields. Archaeologists have found evidence of a sophisticated astronomical calendar — a circle of wooden posts, now called Woodhenge, aligned to mark solstices and equinoxes with extraordinary precision.
The people of Cahokia traded copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the Appalachians, marine shells from the Gulf Coast. They grew corn in quantities that could sustain a metropolitan population. They built, governed, and maintained a city for 300 years.
Then, around 1350 CE, they left. Archaeologists don’t know why. Climate shift, resource depletion, political collapse — all have been proposed. The city was essentially empty before Europeans arrived on the continent.
Why it’s not in your history textbook
The short answer is that it doesn’t fit the story some people prefer to tell about the Americas before European contact — a story in which the continent was sparsely populated wilderness, awaiting development.
Cahokia complicates that story. Significantly.
The longer answer involves the history of American archaeology itself — a field that, well into the twentieth century, was reluctant to attribute sophisticated construction to Indigenous peoples. The mounds were variously attributed to Vikings, to a “lost race,” to refugees from mythical Atlantis. The idea that the ancestors of Native American peoples built a city larger than medieval London was, for a long time, something the discipline found difficult to absorb.
That has changed. The scholarship is unambiguous. Cahokia was built by the ancestors of the Osage, Quapaw, and other Siouan-speaking peoples. Its achievements were their achievements. The resistance to acknowledging this is not a scholarly dispute — it’s a cultural one.
Where Cahokia appears in the novels
In The Temporal Witnesses, Cahokia appears twice: once in Volume 3 (Bronze Age Networks), in an earlier form around 1200 BCE, when the first complex ceremonial site was being built at the location. And again in Volume 6 (Medieval Connections), at its peak in 1050 CE — when Cuchu and Matias witness the city at the height of its power and sophistication.
Writing those chapters helped me work through the discomfort I think the series ultimately earns: what does it mean to witness something this significant, knowing that it will be forgotten? Not destroyed by conquest — simply forgotten, or never remembered in the first place, by the dominant historical narrative.
The series argues that this forgetting is not accidental. Heritage Foundation 2.0 — the antagonist organization across all eight volumes — is a fictional intensification of a real dynamic: the ongoing suppression of archaeological and historical evidence that complicates the stories white nationalist perspectives depend on.
I don’t think fiction can fix that. But I do think it can make people stop and ask: What else don’t I know?
The Temporal Witnesses series (Volumes 1–8) is available on Amazon. Educator guides for classroom use are free at ricardogomez.net/educators.
If this is the first time you’ve heard of Cahokia: welcome to the club. Tell me in the comments what surprised you most.
This is so interesting. I think this should be your basis for getting involved with anti-racism work.