The Fall of Cahokia
Nobody knows why Cahokia was abandoned in the mid to late 1300s, but historians think it might be a combination of things like disease, warfare, conflict, trouble with the watershed and depleted wood resources. Faith in leadership plummeted. There would have been fights over the (increasingly scarce) good land, and warfare between communities. Cahokia built wooden palisades for protection against these new threats.
The city’s’ population moved on, joining other Native American communities and evolved into groups like the Osage, leaving the bustling urban center a mere memory. Seventy mounds remain out of the known original 120, but the most formidable by far was Monks Mound. The city wasn’t suddenly, catastrophically abandoned. That is pretty rare in city evolution. Historians believe it followed a pattern of urban decline, where little things, and time, reduce a city’s purpose and usefulness.
