Cahokia Mounds featured in National Geographic January 10, 2011

Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, located on an older alignment of Route 66 near Collinsville, Ill., is featured in an excellent article in the current issue of National Geographic.

The story reportedly has boosted number of visitors at Cahokia Mounds and prompted a follow-up story by the Suburban Journals of St. Louis.

The National Geographic article by Glenn Hodges touches on the site’s majesty, Americans’ profound ignorance of it, and the fact it and other nearby American Indian mounds have been threatened or erased by development. Here’s a good explanation about such sites:

Other Indian mounds in St. Louis and East St. Louis were leveled and paved over during much of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Kip Welborn’s recent book, “Things to Look Out for on Route 66 in St. Louis,” delves into this in one chapter.)

But it was one of President Eisenhower’s domestic policies — a target of much anger by Route 66ers — that became Cahokia Mounds’ salvation.

President Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway program, though a massive undertaking that changed America’s landscape as dramatically as the railroads once did, contained provisions for the study of archaeological sites in its path. This meant more money for excavations than had ever been available, as well as a clear agenda for where to dig, when, and how fast. With two highways slated to skewer the ancient city—I-55/70 now bisects Cahokia’s north plaza, creating a road sandwich with Collinsville Road, a quarter mile to the south— archaeologists began to systematically study the site. What they found was nothing less than revelatory.

It became apparent that Cahokia was more than just a stupendous pile of earth or a cere­monial site where scattered tribes congregated once in a while. Nearly everywhere they dug, archaeologists found homes—indicating that thousands of people had once lived in the community—and many of these homes had been built within a very brief span of time. In fact, the whole city seemed to spring to life almost overnight around 1050, a phenomenon now referred to as a “big bang.” People streamed in from surrounding areas, built houses, and quickly constructed the infrastructure of a new city—including several mounds with buildings on top and a grand plaza the size of 45 football fields, used for everything from sporting events to communal feasts to religious celebrations.

Because Cahokia Mounds was deemed such a significant historic site, the interstate highway system inadvertently saved it.

However, it still remains a mystery why the Cahokia city was built, and why it was already abandoned when Columbus set foot on the New World in 1492. A number of fascinating theories abound, which is why the whole article is worth reading.

Then there’s this poignant passage when the author tries to find the original mound in St. Louis:

When I drive to St. Louis to see if anything still memorializes the big mound (named, with an appropriate lack of imagination, Big Mound) that was destroyed there by 1869, I’m surprised to see that the exact spot where it was located is where the new bridge from East St. Louis will land. I ask around and learn that archaeologists excavated this lot too before construction started. But they didn’t find a trace of Big Mound, only remnants of the 19th-century factories that had taken its place. That is now the accessible history of this site. The rest is gone.

After a failed first attempt, I do finally locate a marker for Big Mound. It’s a little cobblestone memorial a half block down Broadway from Mound Street, with a missing plaque and grass growing between its rocks. As luck would have it, I find it just as a man arrives to spray it with weed killer. I ask him if he works for the city, and he says no. His name is Gary Zigrang, and he owns a building down the block. He’s called the city about the marker’s disrepair, and they haven’t done anything, so he’s taking matters into his own hands. And as he sprays the weeds on the forgotten memorial for the forgotten mound of the forgotten people who once lived here, he says, “What a shame. There’s history here, and it needs to be taken care of.”