Unearthing Clues to Life in the Big City, 1,000 Years Ago
A Budweiser truck zips by. A billboard overhead promises easy money at a riverboat casino. Another huge sign exhorts: “Jesus heals.”
The world is speeding toward the new millennium. And in a mucky trench by the freeway here, archeologists are scraping off the secrets of the last one.
East St. Louis is not much to look at as Y2K dawns. It’s poor and rickety and jobs are scarce. But it was very much the place to be in Y1K--the Year 1000.
The land that now is East St. Louis then was a suburb of the biggest city on the continent, a metropolis that rivaled Paris in size and that boasted monumental architecture on a scale with the Egyptian pyramids. Tattooed elite strode the streets. Curvaceous sculptures adorned vast temples. Countless cooking fires sent up smoke, smudging the air for miles. Then, mysteriously, the culture sagged. The city shriveled. The people vanished.
A millennium later, scientists are still discovering why.
The ditch by the freeway--and digs elsewhere--may contain some clues. Each shard of pottery, each roasted turkey bone, each dark circle of soil that’s uncovered adds to the portrait of life in North America’s hub 1,000 years ago.
The discoveries also lend an unsettling perspective on our own millennial celebrations. For as they slice through trowel after trowel of prehistoric dirt, archeologists can’t help but wonder what their counterparts in Y3K will be digging--and what conclusions they’ll reach about us.
“A thousand years from now, when people are digging up our culture . . . our debris and trash is going to be everywhere,” said Brad Koldehoff, an archeologist coordinating the excavation through the University of Illinois. “They’re going to be much more concerned about what the natural environment might have been like” before we filled in wetlands, paved over fields and built mile after mile of strip malls, Koldehoff said.
“The study of archeology,” he added, “gives us a lot of perspective on the present.”
Ditch Alongside Interstate 55
For the moment, Don Booth is focused solely on the past.
He’s tramping through an ice-flecked ditch about 400 yards long and 6 or 8 feet deep by the side of Interstate 55. The Illinois Department of Transportation plans to install a drainage pipe here. By law, however, the state must fund a thorough inventory of cultural resources--in other words, an archeological dig--before sending in the bulldozers.
It is by such quirks of transit design that archeologists get their window on the past.
They can’t very well dig up all East St. Louis, although they suspect it was once a crowded suburb of the huge prehistoric city of Cahokia. So they learn to be content with slices of opportunity: the new drainage pipe here, a road-widening there. “There are whole areas,” Koldehoff grins, “that we wish they would run highways through so we could dig.”
The most important regional site, the great city of Cahokia, has been largely preserved as a state park. Research continues there each summer. Cahokia’s caretakers, however, are reluctant to excavate too much, lest they wreck the site for future generations. After all, as archeologist Bill Iseminger puts it, “archeology is a process of controlled destruction.”
There’s no such constraint in the East St. Louis freeway ditch, which will be destroyed anyway by the drainage pipe.
So Booth and his crew of up to 20 archeologists have free rein to uncover as much as they can--as long as they document it all, on maps and with photographs and with tinfoil pouches of soil.
Thus far, they’ve deduced that they’re at the edge of a big ceremonial plaza. They’ve found shards of ornate pottery, burnished smooth and etched with geometric designs, that they consider far too good to have been used for everyday cooking. And there are flecks of shimmery mica, which the ancient natives used for ornamentation during religious rituals.
From dark and light circles in the soil, the archeologists have plotted where construction crews a millennium ago dug holes for the posts that propped up their houses. They’ve found burned turkey bone fragments and carbonized corn kernels--remnants of bygone feasts.
Tugging the dirt-crusted rim of a pottery jar out of the trench as cars whizzed by on the freeway above his head, Booth grinned with delight. “No one’s touched this for 1,000 years. That’s what’s so amazing. It’s still here in East St. Louis.”
Remarkable Accomplishments
The most remarkable accomplishments of the civilization Booth studies are not buried but have been out in the open for the past millennium: enormous earthen mounds.
A thousand years ago, while Native Americans elsewhere on the continent built canoes to ply the oceans, dug canals to irrigate the deserts and carved homes in cliffs, caves and canyons, the people now called the Mississippians were patiently heaping dirt to construct hundreds of ceremonial mounds across the Midwest.
The most astonishing of these, dubbed Monks Mound, rises from the flat, fertile plains of Collinsville, Ill., site of the prehistoric city of Cahokia, about eight miles east of St. Louis. Monks Mound covers more ground at its base (14 acres) than the largest Egyptian pyramid. It rises in terraces 10 stories high, and it is thought to have supported a huge thatched-roof temple or, perhaps, ornate lodgings for the chief.
To build it, archeologists speculate, the Mississippians hauled basket after basket of dirt on their backs. Each basket weighed about 60 pounds.
They made nearly 15 million trips.
All around Monks Mound (named for the Trappist monks who occupied it in the 19th century), the Mississippians built scores of smaller mounds--some cone-shaped, some flat-topped, others rising to pointed ridges. Some were boundary markers. Others supported ceremonial platforms, perhaps to worship the sun. Still others marked graves of the elite.
The accomplishment was so staggering that the first European settlers to see the mounds, in the early 1800s, refused to believe they could be the work of “savage” and “primitive” Native Americans. They figured Phoenician sailors had built them, or maybe wanderers from the seven lost tribes of Israel. They even brought experts from the Smithsonian Institution out to test their theories. In an excavation that soon became a model for the emerging science of archeology, the researchers found arrowheads, pottery and other Native American artifacts scattered throughout the mounds. The earthen monuments were unquestionably local work.
Indeed, the Mississippians built mounds not just in Cahokia but wherever they settled, including on the riverfront strip where the silvery Gateway Arch now frames downtown St. Louis.
“The arch is the same type of thing as the mounds,” Booth mused. “We built it to say we had the money, the technology, the personnel to build it. We built it to show people what we could do.” The Cahokian mound, he speculated, “says a lot about the people and their power. It says, ‘We can transform the landscape.’ ”
Surrounded by fields of cultivated maize, Cahokia likely supported an astounding 20,000 people at the turn of the last millennium. (Other Native American communities at the time were considered big if they could muster 500 people.) It would be nearly 800 years--the American Revolution would be history--before any other city in North America would top the population of Cahokia at its peak.
And it was not just big. It was crowded. For comparison, consider: Los Angeles County in Y2K has 2,200 people per square mile. Cahokia in Y1K was nearly twice as densely populated. “A huge, bustling center,” Koldehoff calls it.
Tentative Answers
So, what happened to it?
Archeologists have come up with some tentative answers.
The boom town of the last millennium, it seems, fell victim to its own success. To what we would now call urban stress.
Researchers believe there were simply too many people in Cahokia. Their fires choked the air with smog. Their waste pits brimmed with trash. Diseases spread easily. Food supplies ran low. Even with all that maize to harvest, the Mississippians suffered malnutrition. There may have been social unrest.
Starting in 1200, they built an immense wooden wall around much of their city. The fortification required 20,000 trees--and it was rebuilt three times. The depletion of forest habitat, which had nurtured a bounty of game, may have contributed to Cahokia’s collapse.
By 1350, the city had been abandoned. No one yet knows what became of its people.
As they study Cahokia’s fate, unearthing arrowheads amid the clatter of freeway traffic, archeologists see parallels with present-day struggles against crowding and pollution. Comparisons are inevitable. And, sometimes, alarming. For, as Koldehoff put it: “The only thing around as big as Monks Mound is our modern landfill.”
Still, the archeologists resist the temptation to use the secrets they’ve gleaned from the last millennium to forecast truths for the next one.
“We can’t predict the future,” Koldehoff said. “We can only try to understand the past.”
