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I was always curious about what great new ideas came into Cahokia and central US around 500 B.C. Their art looks very Aztec.

When the native peopes of s.e. US, i.e. Mississippi were first contacted they had an elaborate class system.

I suspect the new religion or religious ideas included a priestly caste and human sacrifice.

The upright log cabin is very early French. Easterly made a Daguerrotype of the first courthouse in St. Louis, upright log, it was still standing in 1848.

"At Talomeco [in present day South Carolina] they found a town of five hundred houses, abandoned, its fields choked with weeds," Bailey says. "They were told that a few years earlier the town had been struck by a pestilence, which had killed many of the people, and caused the survivors to flee. Some iron tools found at the deserted town by De Soto men showed that the people had already come in contact with Europeans. Most likely they had met the Spanish settlers at San Miguel de Guadalupe, a coastal settlement founded in 1526 and abandoned the following year."
I was under the impression that they were unsure of why the society declined and disappeared. I was more under the impression that it may have been do to climatic factors.

I was always curious about what great new ideas came into Cahokia and central US around 500 B.C. Their art looks very Aztec.

The following might have a connection to Cahokia...

Megadraught and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico (Hemorrhagic Fever)

We know that DeSoto found a thriving civilization in the Southeast and the Mississippi Valley in the early 16th century. But when later explorers returned to the area, just a generation or two later, the large settlements he reported had ceased to exist.

It also seems to be established that the Mississippians had a cultural contact and conducted extensive trade with the Aztecs and other Central American tribes.

Similarly the Pueblo cultures of the Southwest also had extensive contacts with Central America -- though, apparently, very little with the Mississippian culture.

Amazing that there is so much we don't know -- and are only now discovering -- about the history of our own continent.