Cahokia's defensive system featured a central palisade wall roughly two miles long, rebuilt in four successive phases, encircling the main ceremonial precinct. Bastions spaced along the walls served as elevated guard positions, while the log walls themselves were anchored in post pits. Archaeologists have noted the sophisticated construction of this Mississippian-era settlement.
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site's five-mile palisade walls defended main plaza with bastions and guard towers
USAArchitecture
Key facts
- Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site had palisade walls surrounding the main plaza
- Estimates suggest each wall was approximately five miles long
- Four separate palisades encircled the site, built one outside the other
- Bastions or guard towers equally spaced around the palisade walls for elevated defense positions
- Walls made of logs embedded in post pits at least four feet deep in the earth
- Defensive system compared to medieval European fortification design
Site mentioned
Sources
EXPLORE – Cahokia Mounds State Historic Sitecahokiamounds.org
Excavations begun in 1966 eventually confirmed that an enormous, two-mile-long stockade surrounded the central portion of Cahokia. The wall appears to have been ...
The types of bastions present in the four phases of Cahokia's Central...researchgate.net
Even though bastions within Palisade III and IV were about the same size as those in Palisade II (Figure 2, Table 3), fewer posts were required to construct ...
Cahokia - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
The park covers 2,200 acres (890 ha), or about 3.5 square miles (9 km 2), and contains about 80 manmade mounds, but the ancient city was much larger.
[PDF] Cahokia Moundsnpshistory.com
The Stockade, or Palisade, is a 1og wall built for defense. Nearly two miles long around the central ceremonial precinct, it also served as a social barrier ...
Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, Sally A. Kitt Chappell, an excerptpress.uchicago.edu
The Cahokia landscape had mythic dimensions. Stretching for six square miles, more than one hundred mounds rose from the earth with monumental presence.
Was this story useful?
Keep exploring
Every site on this page sits on the globe, and the people who research them are on the Discord.
3D Globe · Sites by country · Story Archive · Research Library · Weekly Journal · Search
AI-generated text · images from the original sources · always verify with the sources.