A City for All Times

Archeologists have produced a number of academic histories about Cahokia over the last century. Unfortunately, many of them rely almost entirely on archeological data and written records from early European explorers. This leaves Indigenous oral histories and linguistics to play a secondary role or even none at all in their narratives. That is a problem because it leads academics to create less accurate histories and it strips contemporary Indigenous communities out of the narrative. This thesis attempts to fix that problem by combining archeology, oral histories, interviews, early written accounts, and linguistics to create a historical narrative that covers Cahokia's history from the millennia before it became a city to the modern day. This thesis also covers a variety of modern policy issues related to the Cahokia State Historic Site, such as co-management, funding, and the push to make the state park a national one.