Column: Notes from Home

Once upon a time there was a city, ruled by a king and a council of nobles. Or there was a collection of villages instead, governed by a chief and a council of elders.

If it was a city, up to 20,000 people lived there, in neighborhoods where artisans lived and created pottery, made stone axes and plows, or jewelry out of copper and seashells. Skilled engineers planned and built grand pyramids, plazas and playing fields.

If it was just a bunch of villages, they were inhabited by a couple thousand hunter-gatherers who had become farmers. The widely scattered mounds were temples to long forgotten gods, used only at certain times of the year or for specific festivals. Or the mounds were glacial deposits, not built by people at all.

We can find this …city … place … whatever … just east of St. Louis in Collinsville, Ill. We don’t know what the people back then called it — probably “the City” or something simple like that. What we call it today is Cahokia Mounds State Park.

I first heard about this place back in July, when I was wandering through a museum in Dubuque that tells the story of the Mississippi River through the centuries. There was a little picture of a bunch of pyramids and the words “1050 A.D — Cahokia, the prehistoric North American Indian city.” The caption went on to describe a metropolis bigger than the city of London at the time, the biggest “city” in North America until Philadelphia in the 1840s.

I think I must have stood there for several minutes, mouth open in shock. Cahokia? A prehistoric North American city? I’d never heard of it before. I brought my family over, showed them the display, and asked them: Have you heard of this place before? Nope, they hadn’t either.

Growing up in Arizona meant that the Hohokam and Anasazi were covered in my high school social studies classes, but neither texts nor teachers brought up the Mississippian culture and their city at Cahokia. Apparently they still don’t come up in those classes today, either.

Since that day in the museum I’ve been obsessed, tracking down information about Cahokia and Mississippian culture, reading books and essays each night before bed. I’m neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but what I’ve learned only fascinates me more. Around 1050 A.D. a collection of villages (first settled in about 800 A.D.) mushroomed in a single generation to a metropolis. A huge plaza was cleared and leveled, then covered with clay and sand. A 100-foot-tall pyramid — one of the biggest ancient pyramids in the world — was constructed, of alternating layers of earth and clay, along with scores of other platform mounds and pyramids. A woodhenge — a solar calendar constructed out of giant cedar logs — was installed.

These people played a game called “chunkey” which involved throwing sharpened sticks at a rolling disk. We know about that because Spanish explorers came across the remnants of the Mississippian civilization in what is now the southeastern part of the United States. From archaeologists we’ve learned that they grew corn, hunted deer, and traded with other peoples from Florida to the Rockies. Forensic anthropology reveals a dark side, too: they sacrificed humans as part of the burial rites for their leaders.

Since these people built with earth and wood, however, and left behind no evidence of their language — their songs, poems, prayers — not much else is known about them. This is part of the reason for the disagreements about their history and the reluctance by some to call Cahokia a city or its ruler a king.

Racism is also part of it. For a long time we Americans chose to believe that these mounds had been left behind by glaciers. We plowed them over on our farms, ripped them up when they got in the way of growing cities, built shopping malls on top of them. Because of our views of the “primitives” living in the Midwest when our invading ancestors showed up, we refused to accept that they could have constructed anything as grand as a city.

Next March I’m planning on visiting the Cahokia site. Will it change my views of the history I’ve been reading? Will I be disappointed? Will this end my obsession? I don’t know. But I’m going there anyway, just in case the combination of knowledge and imagination give me even a small glimpse into the achievements of these amazing people.

Albert Lea resident David Rask Behling teaches at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa, and lives with his wife and children in Albert Lea. His column appears every other Tuesday.