Abstract
About 1,000 years ago, Central Cahokia, located in modern day Illinois on the floodplain opposite St. Louis, Missouri, was a thriving city with thousands of residents. The region around Central Cahokia, filled with farmers and laborers, is called Greater Cahokia. Ongoing excavations at Greater Cahokia have revealed a larger and more complex landscape than previously understood, even though much of the site has been lost to development throughout the years. Using clustering and intervisibility analysis, this research studied the regional spatial design of residential, mound, and elite sites at Greater Cahokia. First-order spatial properties are assessed using average nearest neighbor and kernel density estimates. LiDAR data of the region was used to create a bare earth terrain raster for line-of-sight analyses to compare archaeological sites to random points across the landscape, which afforded an empirical analysis of Greater Cahokia’s land use. Results indicate that the location of mounds and residences at Greater Cahokia exhibited statistically significant clustering. Additionally, being visible may have been an important consideration for the population of Greater Cahokia, with most occupied habitation sites and individual mounds constructed within view of a main mound group. Further, these archaeological sites were more visible than random points within the same extents. These results are suggestive of shared and coordinated decision making for construction projects at Greater Cahokia. Additionally, the findings identify areas to concentrate future conservation and excavation efforts due to the concentration of archaeological features connected with preferences for location visibility.