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By Root 1900 0

prairie ship. The sun was low and the great mound was casting a shadow that looked long enough to reach the Allegheny Mountains. For a moment I saw no sign of contemporary life; St. Louis, just across the river, had not yet switched on its lights. Around me was the mound city and nothing but the mound city. To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia’s day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.

To visitors today it seems obvious that Cahokia and the many other mound sites in the Midwest and Southeast are the remains of Indian settlements. It did not seem so clear in the past. Nineteenth-century writers attributed the mound complexes to, among others, the Chinese, the Welsh, the Phoenicians, the lost nation of Atlantis, and various biblical personages. A widely touted theory assigned authorship to Scandinavian émigrés, who later picked up stakes, moved to Mexico, and became the Toltecs. The science-fiction writer and archaeology buff Robert Silverberg devoted an entire entertaining book to the back-and-forth over the origin of the mounds, which intermittently preoccupied American intellectuals for a century. Thomas Jefferson removed a slice from a mound on his estate, examined the stratigraphic layers, and announced that Indians had made it. George Bancroft, one of the founders of American history, disagreed: the mounds, he wrote in 1840, were purely natural formations.

Charitably, one could say that Bancroft was correct: Cahokia was a product of its geography, which in turn was a product of the Ice Age. When the glaciers melted, water gushed south, creating the Mississippi River and the Illinois and Missouri Rivers that funnel into it. They met in a roil of water eighty miles wide. When the rivers receded, they exposed a wide strip of bottomland. Into this land a group of Indians coalesced sometime before 800 A.D.

Nobody knows what these people called themselves or which language they spoke. They were not “Cahokians”—that name, itself a linguistic garble, comes from an unrelated group that migrated to the area almost a thousand years later. Archaeologists are unlikely to find a better name, though. According to William Woods, the geographer and archaeologist at the University of Kansas, Monks Mound completely covers whatever habitation these people had before they built Cahokia. To see the remaining traces of this early settlement, scientists would have to jack up the whole enormous pile and dig underneath. Almost all that can be known with certainty about this initial group is that it belonged to a diverse, four-thousand-year-old tradition characterized by the construction of large earthen mounds.

Based around the Mississippi and its associated rivers, these societies scattered tens of thousands of mounds from southern Canada and the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. They were especially concentrated in the Ohio Valley, but nearly as many are found in the Southeast. Highways, farms, and housing developments have destroyed most of them, and scientists have investigated only a small fraction of the survivors. Most of the earthworks were shaped like big cones and stepped pyramids, but some were sculpted into enormous birds, lizards, bears, long-tailed “alligators,” and, in Peebles, Ohio, a 1,330-foot-long serpent.

The earliest known examples appeared in northeastern Lousiana about 5,400 years ago, well before the advent of agriculture. For reasons unknown, Indians heaved up a ring of eleven irregularly sized mounds, most of them connected by a ridge, on a hill overlooking the course of the Ouachita River. The biggest was as tall as a two-story house. About a dozen similar sites are known, of which the Ouachita ring is the oldest and biggest. None of the mounds in any of these places cover burials