As Native American Heritage Month wraps up, I’d like to share some images of remnants of Mississippian Moundbuilders culture in southern Illinois and northern Kentucky. Just east of St. Louis is one of the few UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the U.S. that is not a national park—Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Cahokia Mounds was the largest Pre-Columbian urban settlement in what is now the United States. Most remaining Mississippian culture site across the eastern and southern U.S. have been plowed and built over, but a few remain. Here are some.
Just north of the Ohio River half of this mound village site is protected by the state of Illinois. This location was a Mississippian village for about 350 years beginning in 1050 C.E. That’s a period nearly equal to the time of the Jamestown settlement to the present.
Kincaid Mounds observation deck
The site is closed except for this observation platform where you can try to imagine the community that farmed and lived here for so long. And Chance believes many dogs used to live here, too. I didn’t even know about this site until I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way just before crossing the bridge into Kentucky. I’d picked up a brochure advertising Wickliffe Mounds State Park, and was going to explore that site when this surprise came up.
Wickliffe Mounds State Park, Kentucky
This small village began about 1100 C.E. on a bluff above the Mississippi River just after it was joined by the Ohio. This image is taken atop the large ceremonial mound. The mound behind the shelter was where the chief’s home was. Where the museum is on the right edge and the parking lot next to it was the village plaza. On the other side of the museum is a building covering the archeological dig where wattle and daub homes had been built and rebuilt over centuries.
Amateur archeologists began excavating the site in the early 20th century. After decades of private ownership, the land was given to Murray State College which then did further excavation until the area was eventually given to the state of Kentucky. For many years the skeletons of babies who were buried on the edges of the homes were displayed on the floor. As ethics and the law changed, the bones were buried in the burial mound that was behind the chief’s mound. I remember visiting Dickson Mounds on the Illinois River as a boy where a couple hundred human remains were displayed, but are now covered. The Dickson Mounds State Historical Museum was recently closed as well to repatriate some of the remaining artifacts.
Last night, the personal effect of this storage of human artifacts hit home. I attended a presentation by Frank Waln, a Dakota musician and storyteller. He helped curate an exhibit containing his music at the newly renovated Native American exhibition space at Chicago’s Field Museum. This fall he was performing at Harvard University, and was asked afterward to visit the university’s Peabody Museum where the curator wanted to talk with him. A newly-hired Native curator had discovered the museum held a collection of hair samples taken from residents of Indian boarding schools in the 1930s. One of the samples was from Frank’s great-grandmother. He was given an opportunity to pray there. Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that the University will be returning the hair to the families it can identify.
If you’d like to listen to Frank’s (or Oyate Teca Obmani in his native language) presentation, you can watch here.
Mississippi River
The Wickliffe Mounds volunteer told me there was a nearby overlook of the Mississippi River where Fort Jefferson had been built by George Rogers Clark during the American Revolution. The ruins of the fort was later visited by his brother Merriweather on his expedition west. It is hard to see in this resolution of the image, but in the distance is the bridge to Cairo, the southernmost point of Illinois, which had once been a major city but is now mostly in ruin as the fort had been.
As I enjoyed the view, this 80 year old fellow pulled up in his 1955 Chevy. He said he’d lived there his whole life and he’s never seen the Mississippi so low. I told him my dad had a ‘57 Chevy that same color, and he built a board across the leg space of the back seat, so that I could have free range over the back as we travelled around the country in that car.
Millstone Bluff, Shawnee National Forest, Illinois
Back in Illinois, I asked a ranger at Shawnee National Forest for ideas of new places I could visit. She told me about the Mississippian culture site at Millstone Bluff, so off Chance and I went. There are some petroglyphs carved into these stones, but they are very difficult to identify. If you’d like to see petrogylphs in Illinois, a much better location is Piney Creek that I wrote about earlier.
Pictograph?, Millstone Bluff
I couldn’t get any good images of the few petroglyphs I could identify. However, some leaves and the sun helped me find the bird images that might have been there once.
Gravesite, Millstone Bluff
The village here was on top of a bluff and surrounded by a stone wall. The trail circles the village site, and the first location you come upon was the grave area. Long ago, scavengers dug and looted all the graves looking for artifacts.
As you walk around the village, large depressions remain where homes had been. The homes were half underground with wattle and daub structures above. They would be occupied for many years and then burnt down either to get rid of physical or spiritual pests. Later a home would again be rebuilt there.
For me, the most moving part of the visit was seeing the village plaza. The place had been occupied for hundreds of years, and the plaza was trod by generations of Mississippians. The earth was so compacted that even today trees cannot grow where the plaza had been.
Millstone Bluff village plaza