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13.4.2014 Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever : NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153699883/ancient-suburb-near-st-louis-could-be-lost-forever 1/6
Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever
May 25, 2012 11:16 AM ET
by VÉRONIQUE LACAPRA
Listen to the Story
Weekend Edition Saturday 5 min 37 sec
Véronique LaCapra/St. Louis Public Radio
13.4.2014 Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever : NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153699883/ancient-suburb-near-st-louis-could-be-lost-forever 2/6
Across the Mississippi River from St. Louis' famous Gateway Arch is a part of Illinois that's
a post-industrial wasteland.
Some hope the construction of a new bridge across the Mississippi River will help
revitalize the area. But archaeologists worry future development could destroy what's left of
another neighborhood — one that flourished there almost a thousand years ago.
Courtesy of the Il l inois State Archaeological Survey,
University of Il l inois
i
Working just ahead of the cranes and earth movers that are
building a stretch of the interstate freeway, archaeologists have
unearthed the remains of a sophisticated American Indian
settlement no one knew existed.
There are remnants of more than a thousand prehistoric houses
and the base of an earthen pyramid — one of dozens that would
have towered above the original settlement.
This East St. Louis dig sits halfway between a crumbling meat
packing plant and a now-closed strip club. But Joe Galloy, who is
coordinating research here for the Illinois State Archaeological
Survey, says 900 years ago, visitors paddling here by canoe
from the Mississippi River would have seen the tall wooden
temples that stood on top of many of the pyramids. And at their
bases, rows and rows of thatched-roof huts.
"One of the things that I imagine an ancient visitor to this site
would have experienced was kind of a sense of awe and
wonder," Galloy says. "There would be fires and things like that.
People cooking stuff — all sorts of activity. And you'd see this huge village. And it was
13.4.2014 Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever : NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153699883/ancient-suburb-near-st-louis-could-be-lost-forever 3/6
probably a very impressive site, one of the largest settlements that people had seen if they
hadn't been around this area before."
Galloy says archaeologists knew about the pyramids from old maps and excavations, but
they were all outside the bounds of this new dig site. "So for us it was a really big surprise
to come out and discover that we have this big residential area for this ancient city."
Cahokia: A Bustling, Ancient City
Galloy and others believe that what they've found here near East St. Louis is a prehistoric
suburb of an ancient city known as Cahokia, once the largest American Indian city north of
Mexico. Its remains are five miles away.
What's left of Cahokia is now part of an Illinois State Park. It's also a UNESCO World
Heritage Site.
Cahokia is considered the greatest achievement of Mississippian culture, which once
spread throughout the Central and Southern U.S. Here, there were 120 massive pyramids
of earth — more than twice the number of any other site.
Now those pyramids are eroded, grassy mounds.
13.4.2014 Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever : NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153699883/ancient-suburb-near-st-louis-could-be-lost-forever 4/6
Véronique LaCapra/St. Louis Public Radio
I've come to climb the tallest one with site manager Bill Iseminger. Monks Mound, as it's
called, is 10 stories high, with a base that would cover about a dozen football fields. And
Iseminger says it was all built by hand.
"The mounds were built a basket-load at a time," he says. "They didn't have horses or
wagons or carts — all done with human labor."
Most of these mounds, or pyramids, would have supported wood and thatch buildings 900
years ago. From the towering temple on the top of this mound, we would have looked out
over more pyramids, more temples, elite homes, meeting halls and charnel houses, where
the dead were prepared for burial.
13.4.2014 Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever : NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153699883/ancient-suburb-near-st-louis-could-be-lost-forever 5/6
Courtesy of the Il l inois State Archaeological Survey,
University of Il l inois
i
And spreading out below us, a vast ceremonial plaza, bustling
neighborhoods, and in the distance, the rich floodplain of the
Mississippi River, where the Cahokians caught deer and fish
and harvested corn, squash and other crops.
Archaeologists estimate that as many as 20,000 American
Indians lived here. And now, with the discovery of the East St.
Louis site, they think there may have been thousands more. But
Iseminger says exactly what attracted so many people here is
still a mystery.
"Was there a powerful leader here, or charismatic leader, that
drew people in, attracted people? Did something happen here
that drew them in? Or something about the location was more significant? Those kinds of
things we just don't have answers for directly," he says.
Much Of Cahokia Still Buried
Some scientists think Cahokia was a powerful spiritual center, like Jerusalem or Mecca.
University of Illinois anthropologist Tim Pauketat, who has studied Cahokia since the mid-
1980s, says it once attracted thousands of visitors — possibly religious pilgrims.
"We can look around the eastern United States and just see a huge area in which we can
identify Cahokian objects, suggesting that people from Wisconsin, Louisiana, over to
Georgia even, Oklahoma, at least, occasionally came in and then went home with
something from here," he says.
Until the surprise discovery of the new settlement, archaeologists thought this was pretty
13.4.2014 Ancient Suburb Near St. Louis Could Be Lost Forever : NPR
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153699883/ancient-suburb-near-st-louis-could-be-lost-forever 6/6
Véronique LaCapra/St. Louis Public Radio
i
much all that was left of Cahokia — that almost everything else
had been destroyed by development.
And Pauketat is worried: By the time the East St. Louis dig
wraps up later this year, only about a tenth of the ancient
settlement will have been excavated. He says once the new
Mississippi River bridge is finished, the other 90 percent, which
is still buried under private land, could be destroyed.
"Because East St. Louis is right across from St. Louis, it's prime
land for any kind of commercial development," he says.
Pauketat and a number of other archaeologists are trying to get the federal government to
buy the land around the dig site. They want to see the new Cahokian settlement combined
with the larger state-run site and protected as a national park. But Pauketat admits that so
far, that doesn't seem likely.
©2014 NPR