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By a bout A.D. 500 the Mound Builder culture was declining. Perhaps because of attacks from other tribes or perhaps because of severe climatic change that undermined agriculture. To the west another culture, based on intensive agriculture, was beneath present-day 5 St. Louis, and it radiated out to encompass most of the Mississippi watershed, from Wisconsin to Louisiana and from Oklahoma to Tennessee. Thousand of villages were included in its orbit. By about A.D. 700 this Mississippian culture, as it is known to archaeologists. began to send its influence eastward to transform the file of most of the 10 less technologically advanced woodland tribes. Like the Mound Builders of the Ohio region, these tribes, probably influenced by Meso-American cultures through trade and warfare, built gigantic mounds as burial and ceremonial places. The largest of them, rising in four terraces to a height of once hundred feet, has a rectangular base of nearly 15 fifteen acres, larger than that of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Built between A.D. 900 and 1100, this huge earthwork faces the site of a palisaded Indian city which contained more than one hundred small artificial mounds marking burial sites. Spread among them was a visit settlement containing some 30,000 people by current estimations. 20 The finely crafted ornaments and tools recovered at Cahokia, as this center of Mississippi culture is called, include elaborate ceramics, finely sculpted stonework, carefully embossed and engraved copper and mica sheets, and on funeral blanket fashioned from 12,000 shell beads. They indicate that Cahokia was a true urban center, with clustered 25 housing, markets, and specialists in tool- making, hide-dressing, potting, jewelry-making, weaving, and salt-making.