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The biggest city on American soil that you never heard of vanished a thousand years ago.

Cahokia, near St. Louis today, was bigger in its time than London — and its story reads now like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.

It had pyramids, temples, a “wood henge” for telling time — and organized mass human sacrifices on the Mississippi. It influenced almost every American native tribe — and the Cahokia site today is helping change our understanding of pre-Columbian America.

This hour, On Point: the ancient metropolis America forgot.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Tim Pauketat, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His new book is “Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi.” His other books include, “Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians” and “The Ascent of Chiefs: Cahokia and Mississippian Politics in Native North America.”

You can read an excerpt from “Cahokia.”

Charles C. Mann, author of “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.” He is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Science, and Wired magazines.

A visitor to the new Acropolis museum stands behind the Caryatids in Athens on Sunday, June 21, 2009. The empty space in front of the visitor denotes the absence of a Caryatid now on display at the British Museum in London. (AP)

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Giant questions of antiquity, propriety and cultural heritage — beginning with the Acropolis, where else?

In the early 19th century, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, under Ottoman eyes, removed sculptures from the Parthenon — half of the frieze on the Parthenon itself, and a lot of sculptures. Many see the “Elgin Marbles” — ensconced in the British Museum — as a great cultural heist, 200 years old. Now Athens has a stunning new Acropolis Museum, and very much wants the Elgin Marbles back.

This hour, On Point: The Elgin Marbles — London or Athens?

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Athens, Greece, is John Psaropoulos, editor and columnist for Athens News, Greece’s oldest English-language newspaper, and Athens correspondent for National Public Radio.

Also joining us from Athens is John Brady Kiesling, a former American diplomat and trained classical archeologist. He studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and who has worked on archeological digs in Greece, Turkey, Armenia, and Spain. He lives in the Plaka neighborhood just at the foot of the Acropolis and joins us from his home there.

Joining us from the British Museum in London is Konstantinos Politis. A classical archeologist, he is in charge of the dig and the museum at the site of Lot’s Cave in Ghor Safi.

And from Cambridge, England, we’re joined by Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University’s Newnham College and author of “Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found.”

More links:

The website of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens offers photos and information about the Acropolis monuments and the musuem’s galleries.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, critic Christoper Hitchens argued for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece.  In yetserday’s Times, Michael Kimmelman explored how the opening of the museum has renewed the debate.

The BBC World Service offers a collection of " target="_blank">photos of the new museum in Athens:

The King Herself (Photo: Kenneth Garrett/National Geographic. Click for full image on nationalgeographic.com).

3,500 years ago in the heart of ancient Egypt, in the heyday of the pharaohs, a woman took the throne.

A great king had died. A step-son and heir was too young to rule. The pharaoh, queen, Hatshepsut, stepped into power – and stayed there.

She built. She commanded armies. She wore the ceremonial fake beard of a pharaoh’s regalia. And when she had died, her stepson chiseled her name off every monument he could reach. Her mummy vanished to history. Now it’s back, and a new story is emerging.

This hour, On Point: Hatshepsut, the great “she-king” of Egypt.

You can join the conversation. How far do you think we can really understand what went on in one grand life in ancient Egypt, 3,500 years ago?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Chip Brown, author of “The She-King of Egypt,” the cover story in the current issue of National Geographic. 

See the stunning gallery of photos by Kenneth Garrett, accompanying Chip Brown’s article, at nationalgeographic.com.

And joining us from Cairo, Egypt, is Zahi Hawass, world-renowned archaeologist and Egyptologist who led the effort that positively identified the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut in 2007. (Click here for an image of the Hatshepsut CT scan.)  He is Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and leader of the Egyptian Mummy Project, which uses modern science — including CT scanning and DNA analysis — to learn more about ancient Egyptian mummies. Among other projects, Dr. Hawass is currently leading the search for the tomb of Cleopatra and Marc Antony.