Historical March 1987 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
One of the major international efforts of the past ten years has been the international heritage movement. Its purpose has been to point out those locations which demonstrate the important and unique features inherently understood by any culture and which need preservation in order to keep cultural continuity in place.
There are only two such sites in the United States. Yellowstone National Park is one of the two, due to its unique geological characteristics and what these have meant to the native American Indian culture as well as the now dominant American society.
The second international heritage site is Cahokia Mounds.
The significance and uniqueness of the mounds and the Mississippian Indians who built them is hard to put into words.
We are so used to generating awe over the great ruined cities of the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome that the idea of a city in ruins in our own front yard seems foreign (all puns intended).
The ancient Mississippian urban center, now a part of the metropolitan area of St. Louis, goes back over 1000 years.
This makes St. Louis the longest, virtually continuous existing urban center on the North American continent, if not in the entire western hemisphere.
The city the Indians built here, along with the numerous suburbs which supplied food, coal, lumber, and men for its armies, was the stronghold of a society militant in character and huge in its domain.
At its height, about 1250 A.D., it controlled the entire Mississippi valley. Armies would march every spring after the planting, check the frontiers, and bring in tributes.
The society’s art included pieces from Mexico and the Pacific coast; food included shell fish from the Gulf of Mexico. Its hunters brought herds of animals to be butchered for sale in market places.
The religious ceremonies were gigantic, and astronomical knowledge generated three large star instruments, called woodhenges on the analogy with Stonehenge in England. Posts put in the central locations of these instruments will accurately measure the occurrence of the winter and summer solstices as well as the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
A walk on the grounds of the Cahokia Mounds in the fall and winter recalls the character of the urban center built there a millenium ago.
With all the leaves off the trees, the dimensions of the city are clearly seen.
There are plans to take virtually all the trees to return the area to what the Indians made of it.
In the winter, with the trees bare, the size of the city emerges. Standing on top of the central religious mound on the level where the major temples and priest residences were, a visitor can see what a magnificent area it must have been.
Unlike the stone ruins of Mediterranean cultures, the Indians built like the northern Europeans — out of wood and fiber. Nature took all of that back after the society faded away in the sixteenth century – about the same time the Europeans were first canoeing from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico on the highway of the Indian nation, the Mississippi River. St. Louis is lucky to have such a significant area in its list of cultural strengths.
The plans for the new museum at Cahokia suggest it will be more available for appreciating visitors by the next decade than it is now
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, March 1987.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Source assertions about only two U.S. international heritage sites, continuous urban settlement and military domain are reproduced as the columnist’s 1987 interpretation, not independently verified modern findings.
Original source: SD_Times1987_03.pdf, printed page(s) 6; PDF page(s) 6.
