Lidar scans of the site have revealed elevated causeways linking the 'neighbourhoods' of the living and the dead, physical walkways that literally joined the realms.ДЄnd if living at the cusp of the two worlds sounds rather sombre, Cahokians seem to have seen their hometown as a festive place. Living residents settled in the driest spots, while burial mounds rose up in wetter places. 'It's a city built to straddle water and dry land,' Pauketat said. Sprawling across a landscape that combines solid earth with patches of swamp, Cahokia may have served as a kind of spiritual crossroads. For many cultures with roots in ancient Cahokia, 'water is this barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead,' Pauketat said. They didn't find it in Cahokia, which Pauketat believes may instead have been conceived as a place to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead. It's led to generations of looking for that kind of thing everywhere,' Pauketat said. 'People thought that this must be the basis for all early cities. When excavating cities in Mesopotamia, researchers found evidence that trade was the organising principle behind their development, then turned the same lens on ancient cities across the globe. 'It's definitely a bias that influenced earlier archaeologists,' he said. Assumptions that commerce is the key to urban life long shaped a Western view of the past, explains archaeologist Timothy Pauketat, who has studied Cahokia for decades. I keep wondering 'Where were they trading? Who was making money?',' Newitz said.

'Cahokia was really a cultural centre rather than a trade centre. The massive city lacked a permanent marketplace, confounding old assumptions that trade is the organising principle behind all urbanisation. It's what Cahokia didn't have that's startling, writes Annalee Newitz in their recent book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Ancient cities in north america