At Cahokia a man and woman were buried on 10,000 shell beads, and the same mound held 53 young women who had been strangled

Mound 72 lies about 850 metres south of Monks Mound at Cahokia. Melvin Fowler began excavating it in 1967 and recorded about 270 bodies buried in episodes over roughly a century, between about 1000 and 1200. At its centre two elite individuals were laid on a platform over about 10,000 marine-shell beads arranged in the shape of a bird. A nearby pit held 35,361 more shell beads. One mass grave held 53 females aged 15 to 30, laid in two layers, who show signs of strangulation. Scholars estimate almost 62 percent of those buried in the mound were sacrificed. Fowler read the bead platform as the burial of a male warrior chief, the "Birdman". In 2016 Thomas Emerson and colleagues reported in American Antiquity that the beaded burial held 12 bodies, not six, that the two central bodies were a man and a woman, and that more male and female pairs lay nearby, along with a child. Emerson concluded that Cahokia's nobility included both men and women and that the line between people was class, not sex. Researchers have proposed that the mound records the lineage of one leading family with its retainers and sacrifices. The mound is part of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.