Step inside the lost Native American city that rivalled medieval London

A thousand years ago, the land that is now the United States looked very different from the version many might imagine. Instead of a sparsely populated wilderness dotted with small villages, much of North America was home to dense agricultural regions and large urban centres, with cities as complex and politically powerful as those of medieval Europe.

This picture has long been obscured by the absence of preserved stone ruins, and has created an inaccurate perception of what the Native Nations of the United States looked like a millennium ago. But, thanks to the work of archaeology, anthropology and Indigenous oral history, the reality is gradually emerging.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Kathleen DuVal, author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, explains that the centuries around AD 1000 marked “the height of urbanisation in Native North America.”

These places weren’t anomalies. They sat at the heart of political systems, trade routes and agricultural networks that shaped life across the continent.

So why, when Europeans arrived centuries later, had these cities vanished?

The urban landscape of medieval-era North America

Across what is now the United States and northern Mexico, large towns and cities formed the hubs of regional societies which were, as DuVal explains, “equal in size and complexity and sophistication to cities in Western Europe”. In context, medieval London around AD 1000 housed roughly 12,000 people.

In the same period, multiple Native North American cities were similar in scale, supported by intensively farmed hinterlands of maize, beans and squash. This agricultural revolution, made possible by the longer growing seasons of the Medieval Warm Period of 900–1300, underpinned huge expansions of urban growth.

• Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster

As DuVal notes, this expansion led to other changes, allowing for “urbanisation, centralisation and the rise of complex economies and powerful religious and political leaders.”

Supported by new food surpluses, these urban centres became hubs of cultural growth. Within them were full-time craft specialists, ritual practitioners and political elites, while long-distance trade brought in copper, shells, obsidian, feathers and pottery from far-reaching networks.

Cahokia: a major city in the heart of the continent

The largest and most influential of these centres was Cahokia, located in present-day Illinois near the Mississippi River. DuVal describes it as “the centre of the North American world”, with “12,000 or so people in its main centre […] comparable to places like London.”

Cahokia’s layout was a work of serious planning. Monumental earthen mounds formed the foundations of temples, houses and elite residences. The most famous, Monks Mound, remains the largest prehistoric earthen structure in the Americas. Wide plazas hosted markets, athletic games and political ceremonies.

Surrounding the city was a constellation of satellite towns and farming communities, tied to Cahokia through political alliances and economic exchange. Archaeology reveals woodhenge-like timber circles used for celestial observations, intricately crafted shell ornaments, and evidence of large-scale feasting. It was the work of a highly organised and complex society.

• Read more | What and when is the National Day of Mourning in the United States?

And Cahokia wasn’t alone. Across the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast, other mound-building cultures flourished, while in the Southwest, the Ancestral Puebloans built multi-storey stone cities such as Chaco Canyon. Each region had its own traditions, but they shared similar patterns of urban life, monument building and political hierarchy much like the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain.

Why these cities changed

Urban life in North America was closely tied to climate and agriculture and when conditions shifted around the 13th century, the consequences were profound.

As the Little Ice Age began, growing seasons shortened and droughts increased. Communities that had grown around stable food supplies suddenly faced scarcity. Powerful leaders struggled to retain legitimacy.

“In some cases,” DuVal explains, “people revolted against leaders who had claimed to be able to control the weather and feed the people when there were times of famine and drought.”

Elsewhere, people simply dispersed. Cahokia was largely abandoned by the end of the 14th century, its population relocating to smaller and more sustainable settlements along rivers and floodplains. Unlike in Europe, many North American societies adapted to the environmental pressures by decentralising and shifting into more flexible forms of community.

This transition was a transformation rather than a collapse, and Indigenous societies across the continent continued to thrive in new political and cultural configurations.

What survives of Cahokia today

The skeletons of those once-colossal cities are still beneath the ground but are easy to miss. As DuVal points out, “what exists of them today in most cases are just these large earthen mounds […] now they just look like big hills”.

As most structures were built from wood, cane and thatch rather than stone, they have not survived like European cathedrals or fortresses. Though, the emerging history of their presence proves that far from being an untamed wilderness, North America was a land of cities, monuments and nations.

By the time Europeans arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries, many of these urban centres had already changed or dispersed. Colonists encountered mobile, village-based societies and mistakenly assumed that such patterns had existed unchanged for thousands of years.

In reality, they were stepping onto a continent in the aftermath of centuries of immense change.

Kathleen DuVal was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.