Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  THE BIRDMAN TABLET: Cahokians engraved this sandstone tablet, which depicts a man wearing a mask and dressed in eagle (or falcon) regalia.

  Today, we are increasingly learning that all of these statements and long-held assumptions are the furthest thing from the truth. Over the past thirty years, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars, aided by advanced new technologies and scientific techniques such as relative dating (stratigraphy, seriation, and cross-dating) and chronometric dating (including radiocarbon, archaeomagnetism, fission track, and thermoluminescence) have given us a whole new and startling picture of life in the Americas before Columbus. Their investigations have revealed, for example, that in the years just prior to Columbus’s arrival, there were, in all probability, more people living in the Americas than in Europe. The experts have discovered that hundreds of thousands of these people were living in cities, such as the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which had far greater populations than any European city, ancient municipalities that had running water, clean streets, and magnificent botanical gardens. As Charles C. Mann has stated, “Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively ‘landscaped’ by human beings.” According to Mann, this pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere was, thanks to the Indians,

  a thriving, stunningly diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a region where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.

  The majority of natives who lived in the prehistoric Americas that Mann described dwelled south of the Rio Grande. But there was one remarkable community north of the Rio Grande, a city that by 1150 CE had become the largest urban center north of Mexico, a record that would stand until Philadelphia surpassed it in the late 1700s. It is difficult to imagine a city covering more than six square miles flourishing in the Mississippi Valley some 350 years before Columbus reached the New World, a city, which at its zenith in about 1150 contained a population estimated by some experts to have been as high as thirty thousand, more inhabitants than any contemporary European city, including London. Its people constructed enormous pyramid-shaped earthen mounds (the largest, Monks Mound, has a base larger than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt), designed and built solar observatories, and carried out a far-flung trade. Its name was Cahokia.

  CAHOKIA WAS LOCATED IN THE AMERICAN BOTTOM, an exceptionally fertile and expansive flood plain created ten thousand years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. When the glaciers melted, an eight-mile-wide torrent of water rushed southwest, creating the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers. When these waters eventually receded, the vast American Bottom was exposed.

  Beginning sometime between 700 and 800, various groups of Native Americans who came to be known as Mississippians began to settle this rich land. And incredibly rich it was. The forest-filled Ozark Mountains that lay to the southwest of the Bottom contained granite, limestone, sandstone, and other rocks and minerals, particularly chert (a fine-grained, silica-rich microcrystalline rock), that could be used for making tools. The Ozarks were also filled with white-tailed deer, which became the Mississippians’ main source of meat. To the north and west lay the great American prairie, which offered a seemingly never-ending supply of tall grasses that could be used for constructing houses and other buildings.

  The woodlands east of the American Bottom also abounded in natural resources. Along with white-tailed deer, there were such food sources as turkey, squirrel, possum, and raccoon. The oaks, hickories, and other deciduous trees that characterized the woodlands not only provided nuts and berries, but also supplied the hardwood used in the building of canoes, tool handles, bows, and arrows. Finally, there was the Mississippi Valley itself, which not only gave the Mississippians their rich soil, but also abounded in fish as well as ducks, geese, and other waterfowl.

  Of all the various and widespread Native American settlements that took advantage of these natural benefits, Cahokia—situated in present-day Collinsville, Illinois, near St. Louis—far outdistanced them all. According to the Web site of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, it was “named for the Cahokia subtribe of the Illiniwek (or Illinois tribe, a loose confederacy of related peoples), who moved into the area in the 1600s.” Their location at the confluence of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri Rivers was essential to their success. As archaeologists have learned, these rivers and their extensive network of tributaries gave the people who came to known Cahokians access to distant areas where they traded, hunted, and benefited from contact with other cultures. As Claudia G. Mink wrote,

  From their central location, [the Cahokians] traveled vast distances, walking, running, and canoeing along trade routes already established by the Woodland Indians and, to some extent, the Archaic peoples. They got copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians, and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico. And in the process of obtaining these exotic materials, they observed traditions and lifestyles they would incorporate into their own.

  As essential as trade was to Cahokia’s rise to predominance among the Mississippian cultures, so too was the cultivation of a crop that had originated in Mexico some four thousand years earlier. By 800, the Cahokians acquired the knowledge of growing corn (maize), which proved vital in feeding the huge population that the city would attain. As Sidney G. Denny and Ernest Lester Schusky wrote, “As years passed, people learned to cultivate corn intensively and it became a basic part of the diet. Intensive agriculture at the mouths of [the] Missouri, Illinois, and Ohio Rivers laid the basis for [the] growth of Cahokia.”

  As Mississippians, the Cahokians were part of a four-thousand-year-old Native American tradition of mound building. And the Cahokians were the greatest mound builders of all. For hundreds of years, those who came upon the 120 mounds at what had once been Cahokia were not only amazed but also mystified by them. Many of the earthen structures were enormous flat-topped, square-bottomed pyramids. The largest rose more than one hundred feet into the air. One early observer was the American lawyer, judge, author, and Pennsylvania congressman Henry Marie Brackenridge who, after first seeing the mounds in 1811, immediately conveyed his impressions to Thomas Jefferson. “When I reached the foot of the principal mound,” Brackenridge wrote,

  I was struck with a degree of astonishment not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids. What a stupendous pile of earth! To heap up such a mass must have required years, and the labors of thousands. . . . Were it not for the regularity and design which it manifests, the circumstances of it being on alluvial ground, and the other mounds scattered around it, we could scarcely believe it the work of human hands.

  “The labors of thousands”—who could these “thousands” have been? Well into the twentieth century, speculation abounded. One theory was that the mounds were built by a lost tribe of Israel. Another attributed the structures to the Vikings. In the 1860s, Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnelly insisted that the mound builders were survivors of the lost colony of Atlantis. As Mann noted, other accounts credited the Chinese or the Welsh or the Phoenicians. One of the most widely spread speculations claimed that the builders were Scandinavian émigrés who, after moving to Mexico, became the Toltecs.

  In an era of extreme prejudice, few even considered crediting Native Americans. In 1871 J. D. Baldwin wrote, “It is absurd to suppose a relationship of any kind, or connection, between the original barbarism of these Indians and the civilization of the Mound-Builders.” No less a personage than J. W. Foster, president of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, stated that to imply that the Indians, who he characterized as a people “signalized by treachery and cruelty,” had constructed the mounds “is as preposterous almost, as to suppose they built the pyramids of Egypt.” He declared:

  T
he Indian repels all efforts to raise him from his degraded position and whilst he has not the moral nature to adopt the virtues of civilization, his brutal instincts lead him to welcome its vices. He has never been known voluntarily to engage in an enterprise requiring methodical labor.

  A BIRD’S-EYE-VIEW PAINTING by Cahokia mounds expert William R. Iseminger reveals a city aligned with the cosmos: strategically sited mounds, four plazas marking the cardinal directions, and equinox-predicting structures.

  In his 1834 poem “The Prairies,” American poet William Cullen Bryant expressed the cruelest opinion of all: poetically proclaiming that whoever had built the mounds had been wiped out by “the red man.”

  . . . Let the mighty mounds

  That overlook the rivers, or that rise

  In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,

  Answer. A race, that long has passed away,

  Built them;—a disciplined and populous race

  Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek

  Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms

  Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock

  The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields

  Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed,

  When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,

  And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke.

  All day this desert murmured with their toils,

  Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed

  In a forgotten language, and old tunes,

  From instruments of unremembered form,

  Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came—

  The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,

  And the mound-builders vanished from the earth . . .

  Today, thanks to the excavations and investigations of archaeologists and anthropologists, we know that without question the mounds were built by the Mississippians.

  THE CITY OF CAHOKIA WAS PHYSICALLY DOMINATED by the Monks Mound, named for French Trappist monks who lived in a monastery nearby in the early 1800s and gardened on the mound. Cahokia was built in a dozen or more phases beginning in about 900 CE, a time described by archeologists as the “Big Bang,” a period in which, for still unknown reasons, thousands of Native Americans from surrounding regions poured into Cahokia and the city experienced as much as a tenfold increase in its population.

  Covering an area of fourteen acres, making it larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, the clay slab that serves as the base of Monks Mound is about 954 feet long and 774 feet wide. The enormous structure stretches 100 feet from its base to its top. Archeologists and geographers such as William I. Woods of the University of Kansas, who has spent two decades excavating the mound, have discovered that the structure contained four terraces: a large terrace at the front, a second terrace on the east, and two terraces on top. Excavations have made it clear that a massive ceremonial building, perhaps a temple or a palace (where, it is thought, the Cahokian leaders lived), stood at the top of the mound and measured approximately 108 feet long, 48 feet wide, and some 50 feet high. Smaller buildings were constructed on the lower terraces.

  Most archaeologists who have worked the site are in agreement that the temple or palace atop Monks Mound was the focal point from which Cahokia’s rulers carried out various political and religious rituals, including prayers for favorable weather to nurture the acres of maize that stretched out from the city as far as the eye could see. Excavations have also revealed that at some point in the mound’s various phases of construction a low platform was extended out from one of its sides, creating a stage from which priests could perform ceremonies in full view of the public.

  What is perhaps most intriguing of all is the question of how Monks Mound was constructed. Archaeologists calculate that the structure contains twenty-two million cubic feet of earth, which was dug with stone tools and carried out in baskets on people’s backs to the ever-growing mound.

  Sally A. Kitt Chappell provided a graphic calculation of the enormous effort that went into building Monks Mound:

  This pharaonic enterprise required carrying 14,666,666 baskets, each filled with 1.5 cubic feet, of dirt weighing about fifty-five pounds each, for a total of 22 million cubic feet. For comparison, an average pickup truck holds 96 cubic feet, so it would take 229,166 pickup loads to bring the dirt to the site. If thirty people each carried eight baskets of earth a day, the job would take 167 years.

  As Mann documented, aside from the sheer enormity of digging and transporting such an astounding amount of dirt, the construction of Monks Mound presented other significant challenges. The huge slab that serves as the base of the mound was constructed of clay. To minimize instability, the Cahokians kept the slab at a constant moisture level by sealing it off from the air, surrounding it with alternating layers of sand and clay. They also used soil of varying textures to build different parts of the mound and constructed various drains on its sides to ensure proper drainage and structural integrity. Excavations have also revealed the presence of retaining buttresses, inserted throughout the mound to fortify its internal structure.

  As these building methods indicate, the building of Monks Mound was far from a matter of creating an enormous pile of dirt and then adding on to it over the years. They infer the presence of individuals with specialized knowledge of soils and earthen construction. Despite the instability of the materials they had on hand and the fact that they built their enormous structure on a floodplain, these ancient engineers achieved nothing less than the largest prehistoric construction in the Americas, and there it has stood for more than one thousand years.

  Although Monks Mound is the major structure at Cahokia, it is another earthen structure known as Mound 72 that has disclosed the most about the prehistoric city while at the same time raising perplexing questions. Mound 72 is less than seven feet high, yet what scientists—particularly esteemed archaeologist Melvin L. Fowler—have discovered underneath the mound has revealed both the grisly and the spiritual nature of life in Cahokia.

  As documented in several sources, beneath Mound 72 were found the remains of a man buried in about 1050. Estimated to be in his early forties, he was laid to rest on a bed of about twenty thousand shell beads and more than eight hundred seemingly unused arrows with finely crafted heads. Surrounding the corpse were the bodies of three men and three women, all richly adorned; it is surmised that they were probably close relatives. As anthropologists Thomas E. Emerson and R. Barry Lewis noted, “Only a person of central importance would have been buried with such an expenditure of life and effort.” The leader and his relatives were far from alone in the grave. Interred with him were the bodies of four men with their heads and hands cut off—probably, according to some archaeologists, prisoners of war. And that was not all. Also in the grave were the corpses of fifty-three young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five who had been either buried alive or strangled, sacrificed perhaps to serve the deceased leader in his next life. As Fowler and those who assisted him kept excavating, they found other burial pits, one containing the bodies of fourteen people, obviously elites, who had been carried to their graves on litters. Another pit contained the corpses of forty individuals who had been thrown haphazardly into the mass grave and the bodies of more than another one hundred young women who had apparently been sacrificed.

  The discoveries made beneath Mound 72 reveal what archaeological anthropologist George R. Milner has described as the clear distinction between two groups of people: the principal members of Cahokian society, along with their close relatives, and everybody else. And while mysteries remain about the remains found in Mound 72 and their placement, there are specific conclusions on which most anthropologists and archaeologists agree. In Envisioning Cahokia, Rinita A. Dalan and her coauthors concur with many other experts that the four men were deliberately placed in graves to represent the four cardinal directions. And Denny and Schusky agree that the fifty-three women were, in all probability, sacrificed to accompany their lea
der to eternity. On the other hand, while some experts have speculated that the number of men in the grave without heads or hands were prisoners of war, this theory is refuted by Emerson and Lewis.

  WHILE THERE WILL UNDOUBTEDLY always be disagreement over the meaning of what has and what will be found, there is one thing about which the experts are in agreement: evidence makes it clear that Cahokia was a deliberately planned and designed city. From the top of Monks Mound one could see scores of other mounds arranged around plazas. Around these plazas were houses, arranged in neat rows. Pathways connected open public markets, community buildings, and exclusive neighborhoods for the elite. Outside the city lay the main agricultural fields. That the Cahokians centered much of their urban design around plazas is not a surprise. Cleared areas in which games, dances, planting and harvesting ceremonies, and other public events were held were commonplace in late prehistoric Native American communities. What truly surprised the experts, however, was not only the extraordinary size of the plaza—approximately fifty acres, or thirty-eight football fields end to end—that extended southward from Monks Mound, but also how it came into being.

  From the time that archaeologists and anthropologists first began examining the Cahokian site, they assumed that the enormous, almost perfectly level stretch of land that extended southward from Monks Mound and served as the Cahokians’ Grand Plaza was a natural result of the city’s location on a flat alluvial plain. Investigations conducted in the 1960s, however, dramatically changed this assumption. Soil samples revealed that originally the landscape was not flat at all but multileveled in many places, filled with ridges in others, and deeply rutted as well. There was only one conclusion: the Cahokians possessed the knowledge of surveying surfaces and grading and filling even the largest and most difficult terrain. They not only built the largest structure north of Mexico; they created one of the largest artificial landforms in North America.