Age and origin of a Cahokian wooden monument at the Mitchell site, Illinois, USA

Age and origin of a Cahokian wooden monument at the Mitchell site, Illinois, USA

Cahokia was the first and largest precolonial city outside of Mesoamerica in what is now the United States. Monuments and exotic goods were central to public life at Cahokia, but no high-resolution timeline of monumental construction or long-distance material import exists for the site. Wooden marker posts, serving as both public monuments and exotic artifacts, offer ideal sources of evidence for documenting the chronology and spatial scale of C…