Cahokia Mounds

While in Ireland, we went and saw Newgrange, where the winter solstice creates light inside of the oldest manmade building in the world.  A map in the visitors' center had all the UNESCO world heritage sites on it and I was stunned to see one in the Southern Illinois area.  Cahokia mounds is the biggest Native American site north of Mexico. 

These mounds are set in the middle of the in and out of St. Louis which means that "salvage excavation" had to be done on a lot of them before we built interstates right through them.  The site that the state of Illinois has designated a heritage site is much smaller than what UNESCO designated.  It was sad to see the way that Ireland had preserved their sites and we had really just gone right through them to build a sad little down that is run down. 

The birdman tablet was one of the things found at this site and there was active excavation going on there while we were there.  I guess if you don't make it out of stone, we don't really care about it.  There was something good about the site, despite the quarry behind their woodhenge calendar.

This calendar has been rebuilt in order to show how they marked the soltices and equinoxes of the seasons.  And it was reconfirming in some way to see the same geometry and intelligence here as in other places around the world.  You also felt a sense of mankind still needing the same things in the modern world because St. Louis was right across the river.  The things that made this a place for Native Americans to build their largest city remain the same reasons for one of our biggest cities to be in the same place.  We also found an outstand-

ing bakery in Collinsville called Kruta Bakery that had a free doughnut with coffee on Wednesdays.  This was a bakery that you had a hard time picking what you were going to try because everything looked great.  I asked for a long john for my doughnut and they took it and filled it with cream.  Awesome stuff and I have to admit that we had some left when we got to Mistee and Emily's, but did not share this largesse. 

In closing about this site, I want to say that this was a fascinating place, but it was very sad to see how we have built a bigger mound between Monk's Mound and St. Louis that is a pile of trash.  You would think that we could have put a landfill away from this site since it looks like the historical site except for the seagulls circling it.  Aw, the good old US of A.