A thousand years ago, a civilization more sophisticated and more powerful than any other in the Western Hemisphere north of Mexico grew up and florished in the rich Mississippi River bottom land of southwestern Illinois.

These native American people - who are called Mississippians by archaeologists - supported a population as large as 20,000 at their zenith with a wid-scale agricultal economy based primarily on the cultivation of corn. The crops they grew combined with the region's bountiful wildlife and indigenous plants to form a stable, year-round food supply. Such stability and ties to the land gave rise to the formation of permanent settlements that grew into an extensive network of communities with a regional center of metropolitan proportions.

The sedentary lifestyle of the Mississippians made possible other hallmarks of advanced civilization: widespread commerce; stratifed social, political, and religious organization; specialized and refined crafts; and monumental architecture, here in the form of earthen mounds covering up to 14 acres and rising as high as 100 feet.

Their extraordinary success continued for five centuries until, for reasons still unknown, the sun set on the Mississippians as it had on the great Mayan, Egyptian and Mesopotamian people before them. Finally, when agencies of the state of Illinois carried out the first scientific investigations of the area in the 1920s, the true extent of this vibrant culture began to emerge.

The remnants of the Mississippian's central city - now known as Cahokia for the Indians who lived nearby in the late 1600s - are preserved within the 2200-acre tract that is the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Located just eight miles east of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, near Collinsville, Illinois, Cahokia was designated a World Heritage Site in 1982 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for its vital contribution the understanding of North American prehistory.

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