We are not sure exactly how it happened – as an act of religious revelation, perhaps – but around AD 1050 Cahokia exploded in size, growing from a fairly modest community to a city of over six square miles, including more than 100 earthen mounds built around spacious plazas. Its original population of a few thousand was augmented by perhaps 10,000 more, coming from outside to settle in Cahokia and its satellite towns, totalling something in the order of 40,000 in the American Bottom as a whole.34
