Cahokia’s two-mile palisade surrounded its main plaza with bastions

City/town/settlement1000 - 1500 AD
The Roundtable Chronicles - Ep. 26
Source: The Roundtable Chronicles - Ep. 26 by Institute for Natural Philosophy

Site mentioned

📄 Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site🗺️ More sites in USA🌍 Show on the globe

Cahokia’s main ceremonial precinct was enclosed by a wooden palisade roughly two miles (3.2 km) long. The stockade was rebuilt in four successive phases, with later versions set outside earlier ones, while bastions provided elevated lookout and guard positions. Upright logs anchored in post pits formed the walls. This was a main-plaza palisade system rebuilt over time, not four separate five-mile walls.

Key facts

  • Cahokia’s main ceremonial precinct was surrounded by a palisade approximately two miles (3.2 km) long.
  • The palisade was rebuilt in four successive phases, with later versions placed outside earlier ones.
  • Bastions along the palisade provided elevated lookout and guard positions.
  • The wooden stockade used upright logs set in post pits; the supplied results do not establish a minimum depth of four feet.
  • The evidence does not support four separate, approximately five-mile walls.

More about Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

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.
Cahokia: The Plazas - Archaeology and Lidarrthunen.domains.unf.edu
Cahokia is the largest archaeological site in this area. a wooden palisade or stockade was built around Cahokia's core area. twelve to fifteen ...
Hiking At Cahokia Mounds Near Collinsvillethatawaydad.com
Explore Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, an ancient six square mile city of 20000 people and filled with huge man-made mounds.
Cahokia Mounds Outingsierraclub.org
The Sierra Club is hosting an outing on September 12, 2015 at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.
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