The 120 or so mounds were cone-shaped piles of earth took up more than five square miles (about 200 acres) with Monks Mound in the center of Cahokia. One hundred and two feet high and 16 acres in diameter, Monk’s was the largest and most distinct mound (Fagan, 2004:384).
European settlers did not believe that the Native American Indians were capable of building the mounds. The explorers knew that the people who built these structures had to have social complexity and leadership. Located near major trade routes, they must have been skillful traders. The white explorers were convinced that the real mound-builders were a vanished race (Feder, 2002: 153).
Feder described the myth of the vanished mound-builder race in several parts. Excavations of the mounds uncovered stone, metal and clay artifacts that were supposedly too advanced for Native Americans to produce. Iron, Silver and alloyed metal artifacts were believed to be created by a culture more technologically advanced than the Native Americans were. These artifacts were alleged proof that mound culture was older than American Indian culture. The stone tablets found at the mounds had language from other lands in Europe, Asia, or Africa. Explorers thought that if the Native Americans were the mound-builders, they would have been building them when the Europeans arrived. Too barbaric to be the founders of any civilization, Native Americans rarely received credit for their work until many years after they were driven from their homes by white settlers.
The Cahokia civilization discounts Feder’s summary of the mound-builder myths. According to Iseminger, Cahokia was a complex Native American society with city-like characteristics that existed 400 years before Christopher Columbus arrived in America. In the 1920s, Warren K. Moorehead’s work proved that the mounds were indeed built by the Native Americans (Iseminger, 1999).
Native American culture was not too primitive to have reached the level of civilization of the mound-builders. The fertile soil of the Cahokian land caused the population to grow and cultivate crops. Corn farming helped Cahokia grow to the large, complex society that it was during its apex period. Evidence that the Cahokians were agriculturally advanced clearly made them capable of constructing large mounds of earth. The Cahokians took advantage of the natural resources nearby. The forested Ozark Mountains to the southwest offered important rocks and minerals like granite, sandstone and limestone for making tools. The prairie to the north and west was an endless expanse of tall grasses that were useful for building and furnishing homes and other structures ( Mounds website).
According to the official page of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Monk’s Mound was named after the French Trappist monks who lived nearby in the early 19th century. They cultivated crops and wanted to build a monastery on what later became known as Monk’s Mound (Cahokia Mounds website). Excavations of Monk’s Mound revealed several mass burials. The rituals surrounding these burials mimic the ceremonies of the Natchez Indians of 17th and 18th century Mississippi, “where individuals often volunteered to be sacrificed upon a leader’s death to raise their own or their family’s status” (Iseminger, 1999). This was an example of proof that Native Americans built the mounds.
Many of the artifacts found in the Cahokian mounds were the results of heavy trading. Sacred figurines and clay artifacts share the same illustrations as later Native American religious beliefs (Fagan, 2004:385). The Cahokians traded for items such as arrowheads originally from Midwest states. Excavators found other artifacts made from mica and copper hammered from Lake Superior. These artifacts prove that the socially complex society of Cahokian traders made it possible for them to have been the original mound-builders.
Archaeology is the product of the curious nature of human beings who want to uncover the truth about ancient cultures. The mound-builders were once a mysterious race who turned out to be the native people of Mississippi. Through excavations and various other studies, archaeologists have revealed the truth behind the distorted myths of the early 19th century.
