- COLLINSVILLE, Illinois --
A thousand years ago along the banks of the Mississippi River, in what
is currently southeast Illinois, there was a city that now mystifies both
archeologists and anthropologists.
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- At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now
called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world.
About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000
residing
in its surrounding "suburbs" and outlying farmlands. It was the
region's capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and
science.
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- But by 1300, the city had become a ghost town, its
carefully
built structures abandoned and its population dispersed.
-
- Archeologists continue to comb what is now the Cahokia
Mounds State Historic Site, looking for clues that will tell them what
happened here -- why the city and its culture vanished and why the people
who lived here built more than a hundred earthen mounds, many of which
are still scattered across the countryside.
-
- Cahokia is not the historical name of this city; the
current name comes from the native people who were living in the area when
French explorers arrived in the early 1600s. The city's authentic name
-- the name given to it by its creators -- is lost to time, as its
residents
did not appear to have a written language.
-
- But what really puzzles archeologists and anthropologists
is that there are no legends, no records, no mention whatsoever of the
once-grand city in the lore of any of the tribes -- Osage, Omaha, Ponca
and Quapaw -- that are believed to be the direct descendents of the city's
builders.
-
- This odd silence on the matter of Cahokia has led some
experts to theorize that something particularly nasty happened there.
Possibilities
include an ugly struggle for power following a leader's death, a government
gone berserk, droughts, a period of very cold weather that killed the
crops,
disease.... All have been put forth as reasons for Cahokia's demise.
-
- Whatever happened, it was bad enough that people just
wanted to forget Cahokia, according to Tim Pauketat, an associate professor
of archeology at the University of Illinois, who is excavating at
Cahokia.
-
- Despite its hard-luck reputation, the Cahokia site feels
immensely peaceful today. There's no whiff of angst from an unsettled
spirit
world, no sense that anything awful happened here.
-
- The 2,200-acre site contains the central portion of what
had been roughly a 4,000-acre city. Scattered across the site are about
68 human-made mounds of various sizes, some no more than a gentle rise
on the land, others reaching 100 feet toward the sky.
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- Originally, there might have been more than 120 mounds,
but the locations of only 109 have been recorded. Many were altered or
destroyed over the last three centuries by farming and construction
projects.
-
- The Cahokians made three different types of mounds --
pyramid-shaped (with flat tops upon which important officials' houses and
ceremonial lodges were built), ridge-topped and conical. The latter two
were used for burials of wealthy citizens and sacrificial victims.
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- Monks Mound, Cahokia's biggest mound, is a pyramid mound
that rises 100 feet from its 14-acre base. Visitors can reach the top by
climbing the 141 stairs that pass through the mound's three tiers.
Archeologists
have found that a large building -- 105 feet long, 48 feet wide and about
50 feet high -- was once positioned on top of the mound. It's believed
to have been the home of Cahokia's rulers.
-
- Radiocarbon sampling of the earth that makes up the
mound,
as well as tools and other artifacts discovered within it, indicates it
took 250 years to build Monks Mound, from around A.D. 900 to 1150. The
mound was constructed by hauling 22 million cubic feet of dirt from pits
located a mile or so away. The dirt was piled into baskets and dragged
to the site by workers.
-
- Cahokia also contains five "woodhenges,"
circles
of erect posts that served as celestial calendars, marking the seasonal
solstices and equinoxes.
-
- Cahokia is exceptional for its size and complex city
structure, but it is not unique. Seventeen centuries ago, the Midwest was
covered with hundreds of such precisely aligned astronomical markers and
mounds.
-
- These structures survived for close to two millennia
before most were plowed over in the 19th century, paved over in the 20th
century or destroyed by archaeologists digging to recover artifacts such
as pipes, pottery and other religious relics.
-
- A team from the University of Cincinnati's Center for
the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites, has
been virtually piecing together the fragments of the immense existing
earthworks
built by three other prehistoric Native American cultures -- the Adena,
Hopewell and Fort Ancient peoples -- in the area that now comprises Ohio,
Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. The people who built Cahokia were of the
Mississippian culture.
-
- Using archaeological data gleaned from remote-sensing
devices that can detect remains below the ground, and infrared aerial
photographs
and satellite images to figure out where the earthworks had been located
and what they looked like, the University of Cincinnati team is virtually
rebuilding the mounds, using standard architectural rendering software.
The result will be interactive programs that show how the river valleys
of the Midwest would have looked when the mounds were new.
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- At Cahokia, most of the mounds still exist, though some
were destroyed before the site was protected. Two mounds that provided
a clear view of a drive-in movie theater's screen several miles away were
removed in the 1960s to stop people from watching films for free.
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- Anthropologists said it's critical to preserve the
mounds,
which contain many clues about Cahokian culture. While no longer in danger
of being leveled for commercial purposes, the mounds are fragile and
subject
to environmental degradation. State budget cuts have made it difficult
to ensure that rain doesn't wash away the remnants of what is the only
known prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico.
-
- A recent excavation of a small ridge-top mound -- Mound
72 -- exposed the bodies of nearly 300 people, mostly young women believed
to be sacrificial victims, who'd been buried in mass graves. Nearby is
the burial site of a man believed to have been a ruler, about 45 years
of age, whose body lies on a blanket of more than 20,000 shell beads,
surrounded
by piles of arrow tips from tribes that inhabited the present-day states
of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin. They were presumably given
as a tribute to the deceased.
-
- Archeologists believe other bodies buried near the ruler
are the remains of those who were sacrificed to serve him in the next life.
But the skeletons of four men with their heads and hands missing were also
found near the largest sacrificial pit, and no one is quite sure why these
bodies were mutilated before being buried.
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- Certainly, a headless, handless body wouldn't make for
a good servant.
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- Every new discovery here raises more questions than it
answers about Cahokia, said Bill Iseminger, assistant site manager at
Cahokia
Mounds.
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- "I believe that new archeological technology will
absolutely allow us to solve many of the mysteries of Cahokia,"
Iseminger
said. "But right now, what with the budget cuts, we're focused mostly
on keeping the site intact, just trying to survive so that we can make
more people aware of the complexity and brilliance of Native American
culture."
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