Travel Articles > Cahokia

Cahokia

by Dennis Goza
January 2001

The town of Collinsville, Illinois just across the river from St. Louis, has a population of 20,000. It also has striking mementos of another city that stood within its boundaries between 900 and 1200 A.D. It was the settlement of the Cahokians, a Native American culture that moved in, established a prosperous community, and then quietly moved on. We know about them because of the numerous burial and ceremonial mounds that they erected, which prompted archaeologists to excavate in the vicinity for other remnants of their existence.

Nowadays, a city of 20,000 barely makes a notch in the freeway, but in the context of the medieval world, it was a swelling metropolis. In fact Cahokia was more populous than London at the time and its magnitude was not surpassed on this continent until about 1800.

The Cahokians raised a wide variety of crops, hunted, fished and developed a rather sophisticated urban complex with suburbs extending into what is now St. Louis. And they built mounds - some 120 in all, although only 68 are now preserved.

The largest, officially called Monks Mound, covers 14 acres at its base and rises 100 feet high in two levels. At the top, it is believed, once stood the massive palace of the city's ruler. You can approximate his sweeping view of this domain by climbing up the modern stairway that fortunately replaces the columns of logs that were used back then.

It's been estimated that 30 people, carrying 8 baskets of soil per day, would need 167 years to complete this mound. But I'd bet that far more than 30 workers were involved, and that with no labor unions they carried more than 8 baskets a day.

The visitors center displays quite a number of tools, and other artifacts, and has certain areas of the floor painted with the outlines of the foundations of buildings that once stood there. The introductory film is well worth seeing, and its ending creatively segues into the museum's exhibits. Which feature a faithfully recreated village scene, with statues so lifelike that they seem ready to reach out and grasp your hand.

It seems there's a reason for the extreme realism of these. The artists used models who were representative of several Native American tribes (since we don't know which modern tribes the Cahokians actually were related to) and took casts of their faces to mold the faces of their likenesses. (One figure allegedly even sports a vaccination scar.) One of these models - the old man with the walking stick - dropped by the museum later to view the finished product and reportedly was delighted.

We don't know where the Cahokians came from, where they went, or why they left - there is no evidence of any war, plague, or natural disaster that could have wiped them out. But thanks to their elaborate manner of dealing with death, they left a number of revealing clues about how they lived. Fortunately, their preparations included the construction of these impressive monuments that will awe many generations to come.