CAHOKIA -- A Vivid Place -- by Jane Kelley

An enormous dirt mound and a circle of tall wooden poles are sandwiched between a building supply company and a trailer park.

Looking East into Cahokia

Looking West to a different kind of mound

This place has captured my imagination almost more than any other. 

Many people are unaware of it. If you drive on the highway that passes through the site in Southern Illinois, you might assume that mound is just another landfill. I've seen other massive hills that were just grass-covered garbage.

Few people have even heard of Cahokia, even though it is one of only 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States. Cahokia isn't even its original name. When French trappers came to the place in the 17th Century, they named it Cahokia after the tribe who lived there at the time. But the people who had built the place had abandoned it hundreds of years before then.  

Archaeologists, who often had to rush their work ahead of highway construction crews, have been able to learn a lot about Cahokia. People began moving there around 700 CE. By 1100 CE, the city was about 6 miles square. The population is thought to have been larger than London was at that time––14,000 people. They hunted, fished, grew corn, and devoted a lot of time to constructing over 120 mounds out of earth. Some of these mounds were for burial. The largest was not. 

Monks Mound is the largest human-made mound north of Mexico. It is 100 feet high. Its base (13.8 acres) is larger than that of the great pyramid in Egypt. And it was made by people digging dirt and carrying it  basket by basket by basket. To make all the mounds in Cahokia, people had to lug nearly 55 million cubic feet of dirt. 

An artist's rendering of how Cahokia looked.

The ring of tall, wooden poles west of Monks Mound was built to mark the places where the sun rose and set on the equinoxes and the solstices. In front of Monks Mound was a 40-acre plaza. This was a place for ceremonies and feasts. It had been carefully leveled so that people could play a game called Chunkey. 

Chunkey player made out of flint and clay found in Cahokia.

One player rolled a specially carved stone disc. Others threw spears to predict the spot the disc would stop rolling. This highly competitive sport continued to be played by tribes throughout North American hundreds of years after Cahokia was deserted. 

Yes. Deserted. For reasons no one knows anymore, the people, who labored so long to build this city, left it. No other tribes tell the story of what happened. We will never know for certain.

So why am I so fascinated by Cahokia? I do love mysteries. Everyone does. Our brains keep puzzling over questions we cannot answer. And there are many at Cahokia. Why did so many people come together to make this city? Was it a charismatic leader? Was it an astronomical phenomenon? Was it innovations in agriculture? Was it the game of Chunkey? And why did everyone leave after a few hundred years? Recent studies have disproved the theory that it was environmental disaster. There didn't seem to be any enemies. So then why? 

Cahokia fascinates me for another reason. It reminds me of the importance of context. The more I learned, the more intrigued I became. The mounds are far more remarkable when you know when and how they were made.

The people who built Cahokia may not have written anything down with words. And yet they left behind wooden poles, mounds of dirt, and carved stone discs. From those pieces, a civilization comes into view. Basket by basket by basket.

Many stories in other places remain hidden to us. Hopefully, just as in the case of Cahokia, we will stop destroying what we don't understand. There is so much to learn--if we dig.