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Point of view
LOST IN
A historian
Essay by Robert Kuhn McGregor A deep and abiding silence pervades "Monk's Mound," the largest of the earthen structures at Cahokia Mounds Historic Site. Standing 100 feet above the grassy plain, ears straining against the buzz of traffic below and the grinding roar of nearby foundries, a fortunate visitor can sometimes hear that silence. Attending the silence, we could draw closer to the great mystery that is this place, a challenge that Euro-America has done its best to ignore, if not destroy. We are a society trying to drown out Cahokia's lesson. The Cahokia Mounds complex, some 2,200 acres of hand-built hills, wooden palisades, dead-level plazas and ancient burials, lies just southeast of East St. Louis. An Illinois state historic site and a world heritage site, Cahokia nonetheless remains a benighted area, misinterpreted and victimized throughout historic times. Only recently have we begun to comprehend the depth and significance of the culture that flourished here 1,000 years ago. This newly gained knowledge has done little to temper our urge to destroy. Vandals still lurk at Cahokia's gates. The list of those who would deny and destroy the mounds is long and shamefully varied. Among the culprits: French traders, Anglo-American pioneers, Trappist monks, honest farmers, the Illinois Department of Transportation and the government of the United States. If the collective will of this odd assortment had been fully exercised, Cahokia would be as flat as a parking lot and just as well-paved. Ignorance and denial lay at the back of much ill-treatment. As late as the early 20th century, "expert" geologists maintained the mounds were the natural result of glacial outwash, not cultural features at all. (I defy anyone to go to Cahokia, take a good look at these carefully placed and shaped mounds and try to reach that conclusion.) The supposition had many consequences American society considered positive: It justified a desire to destroy the mounds with impunity, contradicted native Indian claims to a multifaceted heritage and saved Illinois the money and bother of buying the complex. Even admitting the mounds were human constructions did not blunt the racism of this early scholarship. Whites were reluctant to accept that the Indians living in the Mississippi Valley when Europeans showed up were descendants of the mound builders. Instead, they attributed the mounds to the Phoenicians, the 24 November 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues
Vikings and men from outer space. Indians, so the argument went, were too uncivilized, disorganized and barbarous to build anything so complicated as a mound. Therefore, American society could exploit the mounds for profit, along with the rest of North America. Having no civilization, Indians had no property rights. So the mounds suffered in Euro-American hands. There used to be a great many more throughout the region, but a lot were removed for fill dirt, and to make room first for farming and then for urban sprawl. In 1809, Trappist monks with a vow of silence set up a monastery on the largest mound, but left after a few years. (Perhaps they became uneasy in a silence more profound than their own.) In the first half of the 20th century, farmers destroyed a few mounds on Cahokia's edges. More recently, state and federal highway construction has severely compromised the site. A state highway runs straight through the main plaza; the big Elsenhower freeways compromise the borders east and west. Cahokia today is a much diminished monument, gamely defying the encroachments of an alien culture. Only since the 1960s have scholars really begun to reveal Cahokia's story to the world. For more than a century, anthropologists struggled to grasp the cultural complexity of the people who embarked on the three-century construction project culminating in the city of mounds. These are no random piles of earth. They are deliberately oriented to the points of the compass, embodying a series of circular "woodhenge" designs demarcated by posts. The city planners carefully pinpointed the location of each mound, supervised its making, consecrated its completion. Even the lands between the mounds received careful attention: The main plaza, an area of more than 20 acres, was filled in with a foot of earth and made to be perfectly level. Working with common dirt, the planners slowly developed an engineering marvel. Even now, remarkably little is known about Cahokia. Ninety-five percent of the area remains untouched by the archaeologist's trowel. Much of what has been done is salvage archaeology, performed in a race against the bulldozers preparing the highways. Some finds have proven spectacular: elaborate burials of religious figures steeped in images of the falcon, puzzling burials of figures without heads or hands, www.uis.edu/~ilissues Illinois Issues November 2000 25
troubling evidence of maiden sacrifice. When the gods demanded death to the innocent, a new form of worship was born. Religion at Cahokia became an intricate affair. What the anthropologists have to say about this is mostly educated guesswork. Visitors can learn a lot about anthropologists by wandering through the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center. (Learning about the original Indian residents is another question.) For all that they study the myriad ways of other cultures, scholars tend to be a conservative lot. Given the opportunity, they tend to envision past cultures in terms of 1950s America. A strict sexual division of labor — the women at home with the babies — and a glorified worship of social hierarchies ruled the day 1,000 years ago, according to the exhibits. Instructively, the work of two women archaeologists — one from the 1940s, the second from the '70s — was much ridiculed among the scholarly community for its inadequacies. Only recently has the work of both women been substantiated as perceptive and largely correct. Both the archaeological reports and the artifacts reveal the evidence for such a social model to be flimsy. Certainly there was a hierarchy at Cahokia — a chiefdom, in the technical parlance. How it emerged from the nonhierarchical lifestyles of early agricultural peoples is impossible to say. Somewhere around 900 A.D., the first among equals began to grow in stature. Maybe they controlled the religious ceremonies that got the maize (a newly adopted crop) to grow properly. Soon, these folks were living atop the mounds, getting the best selections of meat, wearing the fancy baubles and getting buried with sacrificed young women. Civilization had come to the Mississippi. The interpreters have it that the new religion overlay — but did not obliterate — a folk religion based on fertility. This is an intellectual way of saying that an agriculturally based religion centered on sacrifice displaced a primitive folk religion centered on sex and reproduction. Progress at Cahokia. The displacement of one form of religion by another is true enough, I suppose, but I seriously doubt the "progress" notion. Among the artifacts on display there is not much evidence of primitive fertility cults. What is there is lots of carved imagery of women with babes at the breast. A nurturing cult, honoring parenthood and the welfare of the children? Perhaps so, but this would make it difficult for scholars to argue that development of a religion emphasizing sacrificial death was a step up the elusive ladder of progress. Death is better than nurture? Probably the Indians saw it that way too, in the end. The Cahokia hierarchy flourished for about two centuries, then began a downward spiral. Settlements, peopled by refugees from the great mound center, began to appear in the Illinois Valley, and as far away as Wisconsin. Cahokia's power diminished; in another 200 years, the place was virtually abandoned. The mound builders returned to simpler, more egalitarian lifestyles, where resources were shared more equally. Why should some fat clotpole on the mound get all the best cuts of the deer, while everyone else got the hooves? We know some of this through scientific studies that can measure the nutritional — and thus hierarchical status — of individuals within a culture. What is left of the "material culture" can tell us much, too. So the big chieftains disappeared, along with their opulent burials; the common folk regained control over their lives. After taking several steps toward social stratification and gross monumental thinking, the Indians abandoned civilization and its glories for simpler, perhaps happier societies. Anthropologists refer to this as a devolution, a stepping backwards. Always our society is dazzled by big constructions, powerful displays and ostentatious ceremony, forgetting that such things are achieved on the backs of ordinary people deprived of the good things for no good reason. Cahokia is just one more story of how 26 November 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues a few big men learned to exploit their fellows, rather than share in a common nurturing. The actual demise of Cahokia is one of the greater mysteries of North American archaeology. A slow but irreversible overuse of the resource base by a too-large population is generally the best guess. In the interest of patron participation, the interpretive center allows visitors an opportunity to make their own guesses. Again, the results are instructive, more reflective of our own times than life 1,000 years ago. By far, most visitors to Cahokia (when I was last there) blamed the collapse on a failure of leadership — no surprise in this post-Watergate era. Patrons displayed some reluctance to attribute the cause to climatic change, avoiding the issue of global warming, perhaps. Least popular of all was the proposal that Cahokia's fall resulted from overexploitation of the land. Like the anthropologists, visitors interpret the past in terms of hopeful sentiments from the immediate present. Separated by 1,000 years of history, we assume that the Cahokians experienced life as we do. Outside the interpretive center, Cahokia seems a fragile, brooding place, an anachronism threatened on all sides by the all-devouring industrial society of the Midwest. Cahokia Mounds is a cultural monument in a tawdry setting. In the mid-20th century, the neighborhood was run by Al Capone's minions: Gambling, prostitution and auto theft did well here. Remnants of this heritage persist. Archaeologists are unable to leave tools at digging features overnight, knowing they will be stolen. The original site museum, established during the 1970s in a residential house, was nearly wrecked by vandals. Not for nothing does the new center look like a well-protected bank building. Even now, visitors are warned not to leave valuables exposed in their cars. This past summer, locals took to riding over the mounds on ATVs. For close to three centuries, the Euro-American response to Cahokia's existence has been overwhelmingly negative. We have denied the mounds' existence as cultural artifacts; we have tried in myriad ways, private and public, to destroy them. The highways surround, bisect and belittle the site, while industrial pollution dominates the skyline and local ne'er-do-wells attempt to trample the remains. At every level we display our disbelief, our disrespect. Cahokia may be North America's most significant prehistoric cultural monument, but that cuts little ice with our society. Cahokia had best watch out, it is very nearly in the way. Like all true historic sites, Cahokia Mounds is a mirror we hold up to ourselves. In its past, we can see what we mean when we say "society," "civilization" and "religion." The Cahokians had other words for these concepts, but they certainly knew of them, experienced their meanings. In the end, they came to nothing. Chiefly power collapsed, and people walked away. Now, in a very different time, we regard ourselves as vastly superior to the Cahokians because we have a stratified society, a nationalized civilization and an intricate religion. We believe these are permanent, and immensely better than the nurturing culture of prehistory's common Indian. What respect we feel for Cahokia comes from the perception that the city was an attempt — a failed attempt — to build a society like our own. Go and stand on the big mound. Listen to the cars hurtle by, watch the smokestacks on the horizon. The mound provides a spectacular view of the monuments produced by our own culture. The Cahokians are gone. The monument they left, the great mound, responds to our hubris with that deep and abiding silence echoing beneath our racket. Robert Kuhn McGregor, an environmental historian at the University of Illinois at Springfield, is a regular contributor to the magazine.
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