Mound 72 at Cahokia, Illinois contains a pit deposit with approximately 53 young women who appear to have been ritually sacrificed around 1050 CE, along with other mass deposits suggesting organized violence. This evidence demonstrates that the Mississippian chiefdom at Cahokia engaged in human sacrifice and maintained control through coercive power over subject populations.
Indigenous peoples had inhabited North America for at least 15,000 years before European contact, developing complex societies across every region of the continent. The Mississippian culture, centered on the city of Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, reached its peak around 1100 AD with a population estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 — larger than contemporary London. The Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone complexes at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde between the 9th and 13th centuries. The Iroquois Confederacy, formed between roughly 1450 and 1600, united five nations under a constitution that influenced later American democratic thinking. Across the eastern woodlands, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, and the Southwest, hundreds of distinct nations maintained sophisticated trade networks, agricultural systems, and governance structures. European contact beginning in the late 15th century introduced epidemic disease — smallpox, measles, influenza — which devastated Indigenous populations by an estimated 50 to 90 percent within a century.
Pre-Columbian tribal groups — specific identities and numbers unknown; scale inferred from archaeological evidence
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