Cahokia Mounds, Part 2

Even though a few weeks have passed since we were there, the scene at Cahokia is still on my mind. Part of it is the fact that for hundreds of years, this was the center of a busy, progressive civilization . . . that has vanished. That is always a sobering thought.

But I also keep returning to the fact that they built a mountain where there had been none. As a community, they did this. Why? So there could be a mountaintop for their leaders to stand upon.

I have always been mindful of the connection between landscape and inscape, so to speak—the symbiosis between geography/scenery and mood/attitude. There are certain landscapes that seem to have an almost universal influence on our human psyches—the river makes us mindful of constancy, progress, inevitability, change, flow. The ocean, with its monthly cycles of tides and its breathing pattern of waves washing in and out, gives us a sense of peace, of completion, the circular unity inherent in the notion of polarities.

And mountaintops make us feel like Jesus. The broad view, the elevated mind, the scaling of heights, the reaching of accomplishment. I think that every human religion has at least one or two mountains that are held sacred—Mount Sinai, Mount Fuji, the Himalayas, Kilimanjaro . . . the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona from which the Kachinas are said to originate . . . even the New Agers in Sedona imbue the cliffs and buttes of that region with spiritual power.

And I think back to all the places where I have gone repeatedly to commune with nature and with my higher self (for want of a better word), or with God or Brahma or whatever you want to call it, and in nearly every case, elevation was involved.

South Mountain Park in Phoenix, where I could see the entire Valley of the Sun spread out before me.

Shooting Star Bluff at Gans Creek, Columbia, Missouri, where I can see the creek burbling along below and deer and turkey wandering around on the flat bottomland beyond that.

The mountains at Priest Pass, Helena, Montana. Or Mount Ascension. Or even just Sugarloaf, the relatively minor hill overlooking our house when we lived there.

There is nothing like the view from a bluff or a mountaintop to help me clear my head. It is interesting to know that that sense connects me with prehistoric humans, as well as those who will succeed us.

Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site

Collinsville, Illinois

I’ll talk even more about this place in a subsequent post, but I want to give you a little background first. Here’s the official Web site.

Waaaaay before there was a Collinsville, or an Illinois, waaaay before Europeans rode in boats to North America, there was a thriving civilization in this area. Their prehistoric city reached its peak between AD 1100 and 1200. As many as 20,000 folks lived in the community at that time, and they erected at least five “Woodhenges” (Stonehenge-like calendars made of red cedar posts, which line up with the sun on solstices and equinoxes).

The civilization that built the Cahokia Mounds is known as the Mississippian culture, which emerged from Late Woodland peoples who settled in the area around AD 700. By 900 the Mississippians were building homes and cultivating maize, and their spear points, pottery, and other tools continued to improve. As the community grew in population and sophistication, political and religious leaders emerged, and in addition to their tons of dwellings, 120 earthen mounds were erected in about six square miles. A two-mile-long stockade was built around the center of the town.

There are 80 surviving mounds in the Cahokia site, and the largest is Monks Mound, which has four terraces and is approximately a hundred feet tall. Its base is about the same size as the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s the largest human-built earthen mound in North America, and it stands like a flat-topped pyramid in the middle of the otherwise relatively level Illinois landscape. In fact, the mound builders actually made the landscape more level around the mounds, accentuating the mounds’ height.

Get this: The soil was transported by baskets.

The city at Cahokia (not to be confused with the modern town of Cahokia, several miles southwest of the mounds site) was the center of Mississippian culture, which extended throughout eastern North America. The city was gradually and finally abandoned by the close of the 1300s. Archaeologists can only offer hypotheses about what happened to the people and their civilization.

In the 1600s, the Cahokia tribe of Illinois Indians (unrelated to the mound builders) lived in the vicinity when the French reached the area, and so the site was named after them. Apparently there’s no real name for the people who built this city, with its marketplaces, sporting events, religion, arts, communal sense of purpose, far-flung trade connections, agriculture, and astronomical discoveries.

Photos, top to bottom: Two views of the steps leading to the top of Monks Mound, taken when we were there on Saturday July 25. Next, part of the huge mural at the visitors center (which I think is in three-point perspective, like the famous “turning” Eads Bridge mural at the Missouri State Capitol). And just above, the Birdman Tablet, AD 1300, a sandstone tablet showing a dancing guy with a bird mask and costume, an image that became part of the Cahokia Mounds logo.