Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Stand at Exchange Avenue, on the Illinois side of the future Mississippi Bridge, and listen hard…past the thud of shovels on sunbaked dirt, the swish of tarps covering freshly dug pits…until you hear the distressed lowing of cattle and the shrieks of hogs once penned at the
St. Louis National Stockyards. Listen even harder, and hear the wet slap of palms on coiled clay, forming a jar; the clack of Mill Creek chert on snowflake basalt, insistently chiseling an axe blade; or murmured prayers to a fertility goddess, for the maize feeding a metropolis of an estimated 3,000 people where once only nomads lived.
By winter, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois), working with the Illinois Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration, will have nearly finished excavating the largest prehistoric dig in North America. It’s one of the biggest contiguous sites of a Mississippian city ever excavated. It’s also the most complicated excavation local archaeologists have ever done, peeling up thick layers of 19th- and 20th-century fill packed with cinders and rubble and removing concrete foundations, water mains, and sewage pipes to expose the miraculously well-preserved remnants of a Native American city 1,000 years old.
I meet archaeologist Brad Koldehoff at Cahokia Mounds’ Monks Mound, which, he reminds me, is bigger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Giza. As we drive toward the East St. Louis Mounds dig, he points out a string of smaller mound sites that once connected Cahokia and East St. Louis: Powell Mound, now covered by Foodland Warehouse Foods; the mound now marked only by Indian Mounds Motel; and the Sam Chucalo Mound preserved by the Chucalo family in their front yard.
“The East St. Louis Mounds are halfway between Cahokia Mounds and the [long-gone] St. Louis Mounds,” says Koldehoff, the cultural resource coordinator for the Prairie Research Institute. “It was all one site, really, separated only by the Mississippi River. Think prehistoric urban sprawl.”
We pull into a makeshift parking lot next to the cement basin, where the stockyards once flushed hogs’ waste. Clusters of archaeology students are visible as far as the eye can see, sweating through bandana headbands and straw hats as they dig and mark and map.
“For years, we thought this site had been eradicated,” Koldehoff says. At Cahokia Mounds, deep plowing and heavy rains had destroyed what was left of the Mississippians’ residential areas. In St. Louis, the high ground had been leveled, the remaining mounds shoveled away in the late 1800s and early 1900s, bit by bit, for fill dirt. But East St. Louis’ bottomlands kept flooding, so the city kept adding fill—and that fill preserved what lay beneath it.
The archaeological team has unearthed more than 2,500 features, including more than 1,500 cooking or storage pits and nearly 500 house floors. The houses that burned down just before the site was abandoned hold the best hope. “If something gets charred,” Koldehoff explains, “it can remain in the ground, stable, for thousands of years.” Even charred food is preserved intact (thank God for bad cooks). The team knows what trees the Mississippians used to build their houses because the ring pattern of the wood is preserved by little pores. It’s found grape seeds; hickory-nut shells; bone fragments from deer, waterfowl, and fish; and piles of burned rocks that were probably layered in pits, between layers of leaves, to steam food.
Then there are the artifacts. Seeing my eyes light up, Koldehoff cautions, “A site is significant not because it has lots of artifacts, but because it has lots of information. We’re not here just to collect artifacts. The site is important for what it’s going to tell us about what happened a thousand years ago. There’s no other way to learn about this time period, this civilization.”
Nonetheless, the artifacts are pretty damn cool. Project archaeologist Patrick Durst shows me a sampling, laid out carefully on the back of a truck. The first is a Mississippian jar: “You can date it by the slope of its shoulder, the materials used, the surface decoration, the handle.” Second is a long oval digging tool of Mill Creek chert, mined by Mississippians about 100 miles to the south. It’s slick with plant resins, showing it was likely heavily used a millennium ago. Next to it lies an adze, a woodworking tool, also well-used. Then there’s a wedged axe head of snowflake basalt Durst says “could have taken hundreds of hours to grind and polish—feel how smooth it is!”
For fun, there’s a chunkey stone: It was rolled, and players threw spears at the spot they expected it to stop. “It may have been unfinished,” Durst observes. “It’s polished on only one side, as though somebody got bored.” He shows me Ramey incised pottery, fineware akin to our “good china” that was used for display and had symbols and icons that may have indicated clan membership or ritual functions. “The kinds of pots they made and how they decorated them changed frequently. We can separate things out at least every 50 years, if not sooner,” he says. He holds up my favorite decorative detail, the perfectly shaped head of a wooden duck. “The way they viewed their world was in different levels,” he explains. “Ducks were important because they could pass through water, air, and land.”
Koldehoff introduces me to project coordinator Joseph Galloy. “Why build mounds in the first place?” I ask him.
“They’re monumental architecture,” he says simply, “signs of wealth and power that commemorate sacred space.” Greeks used marble; Mississippians used earth.
But while their graves and temple platforms rose high above ground level, the foundations of their houses were semisubterranean. The Mississippians sank poles into trenches well below the ground, so their houses were cooler in summer and warmer in winter. In some of the excavated floors, long-buried tools are wedged into the earth, and table-like rocks were probably used as workbenches. Team members get excited just to find ground stained where an unusually large pit was dug, for reasons they can only guess. But nothing has yet topped the Exchange Avenue figurine.
When the dig started, Galloy teasingly informed the site director, “I expect you to find a stone figurine.” Which, he admits, “was kind of an unreasonable request, because only five of them had been found in the whole area.” But not long after his remark, a student, digging meticulously in a former hog lot, unearthed a perfectly intact statue: a kneeling woman, about 4 inches tall, carved from stone.
Only a handful of similar figurines had been discovered in the region, usually in rural areas. They seem to represent a popular fertility cult rather than a formal religion; the male priests at Cahokia Mounds had no such devotional objects. One of the figurines previously found is a goddess using a hoe, which turns into a snake, writhes up her back, and splits into two vines heavy with gourds. In another, a snake coils around the goddess’s head and crops grow out of her hands. But the Exchange Avenue figurine kneels, her eyes almond-shaped, her lips slightly parted, and holds a hollowed conch shell. “People would drink something called ‘black drink’ out of shells during ceremonies prior to important events, like going off to battle,” Galloy says. “It was like a tea, and they would vomit afterward; it was a cleansing or purging sort of ritual. Possibly—but this is just conjecture—that would’ve been the use for such a shell.”
The team’s since found another enigma: a fragment of a pipestone figurine that shows the head of an individual. “The face almost looks skeletonized,” Galloy says. “It’s very flat, with a jaw projecting outward, like a skull or head pot that represents a dead ancestor. You see slits that look like nasal cavities, no nose, a broad grin, tattooing around the mouth and cheeks—the same kind you see on head pots.”
The East St. Louis site even had a sort of artists’ colony: A number of households were making ear spools. You know those huge discs kids stretch their earlobes to accommodate? Elite Mississippian males wore similar ornaments, increasing in size as the opening expanded. The stone wasn’t the common Missouri flint clay, either. It was a lavender, delicately splotched Baraboo pipestone that must have been imported from Wisconsin.
That wasn’t the only import; the team’s found beads carved from shells from the Gulf of Mexico and pottery that probably originated in Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa.
“We thought Cahokia was the main place where the Mississippians were building a city from scratch,” Galloy says. “But we’re finding the same things at East St. Louis.”
Here’s the best possible reconstruction the archaeological team can make, at this point, of the site’s history:
• The East St. Louis site is first inhabited by scattered, small villages around the year 650. It’s not densely occupied; inhabitants tend to slash, burn, and move on.
• Then, around 900, they start growing maize, which requires more labor and can feed more people. The farmers settle down, the community takes on more structure, and there must be some sort of property rights and community plan established, because people often tear down and rebuild on the same site.
• In 1050, there’s an abrupt transition that archaeologists now call the Mississippian Big Bang. Population increases, and the area becomes urban, with distinct neighborhoods, varied activities, and marked differences in status and wealth. Artifacts have characteristically Mississippian details.
• In 1200, after fires rage throughout the site, it is abandoned. Residents at Cahokia Mounds start building palisades to protect their area, but its numbers drop, and within a century, Cahokia, too, is abandoned.
“Was the East St. Louis burning deliberate, a ritual closure before they moved on?” asks Tim Pauketat, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “One of the ridgetop mounds looks like it was built right about then; maybe a great leader died, or a royal lineage ended. Or were they attacked, because this was where the important people are living?”
Maybe the maize crop ceased to flourish, or people netted all the small fish, chopped down too many trees for firewood, and overhunted the deer and waterfowl. Maybe there was a great flood or drought. And of course, some of the burned houses might have just caught fire by accident: “They were just bundles of kindling,” Koldehoff points out, “poles with cattail mats or bundles of prairie grass as roofs.”
Whatever happened, the clues are now in boxes, washed, bagged, and labeled. Over the winter, they’ll be sent to specialists in botany, zoology, geology, carbon-dating, and other areas for analysis as suspenseful as CSI.
Before I go, Durst leads me to the south end of the site, where the stockyard workers lived. “By the 1880s, this was a fully functioning residential neighborhood,” he says. “We overlaid fire-insurance maps onto modern aerial maps, and we can then plug that information into census records to see who was here.” The foundations and privy holes of the houses they rented were sometimes dug right through the earlier Mississippian house floors and cooking pits. In their trash, the team’s found enamelware, glass shards from their ale bottles and patent medicines, privy remnants of the Eastern European and African-American workers’ meals.
Nothing existed on this land between the stockyards and the Mississippians. And the prehistoric structures on this end of the site were larger, more specialized, and probably public buildings. One was round, built exactly around a square structure. “Most likely the square building held some importance—it might have been a sweat lodge or a ritual building—and people erected the circular structure on top of it,” Durst speculates.
There’s one more field season to go, but most of the excavation’s complete; the teams sweated to keep ahead of the bridge construction schedule. They’re digging only 10 percent of the site, and they’re finding Mississippian occupation everywhere.
Most of the surrounding land is privately owned, and because the new bridge will increase commercial prospects, developers are lining up. They could, of course, do what the state was mandated to do by the National Historic Preservation Act, and conduct an archaeological survey before they begin any construction. But nobody’s taking those odds.
“This may be one of the most important ancient places on the continent, and I’m afraid it’s going to get carved up and sold off and destroyed,” Pauketat says. “There’s evidence of some kind of major North American historic event locked up in that place, and I’m afraid we’re going to lose it.”
