Mississippi River and Cahokia Mounds
November 6, 1997
There are cultural landmarks thought by some to be of international importance in the history of mankind. Included in this elite group are the City of Rome, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, and the Florida Everglades. By chance, we happened upon another - the Cahokia Mounds World Heritage Site in Collinsville, IL. Through no careful plan of my own, during my life I have visited all of these sites except for the Cahokia Mounds. It presented me with the opportunity to make a subjective evaluation and comparison of these sites.
One of the major differences between sites in the United States and those in other countries is that the foreign sites are man-made structures. They are based on the skills of craftsmen and the willingness of ancient rulers to devote large amounts of labor, a large fraction of their wealth and the lives of their subjects to the construction of these sites. By contrast, most of the sites in the United States are National Parks devoted to conservation and preservation of the scenic natural systems. The exception is the Cahokia Mounds which are man-made structures.
Another difference is that US sites usually have outstanding visitor’s centers. This is especially true of the Cahokia Mounds park. It is a large, modern center where it is recommended that visitors begin their visit with an excellent movie that provides an overview and explanation of the Indian culture that built these mounds. For me, the fairly dry subject of archeology was turned into a visually and intellectually exciting event. Pat and I spent about four hours learning about how archeologists sift through dirt to find ancient grains of corn and fragments of pottery from different strata of soil. From the evidence found, they speculate about why this old city died when it had about 20,000 people at its zenith. Maybe it had something to do with the apparent fact that human sacrifice was a common feature of the culture. Three headless men’s bodies were found in one grave and when a chief died, a few young women might be sacrificed and buried with him. Over-population, disease, not enough protein in their diets, or pollution may have been other causes.
Maybe I missed something, but I never saw any visitors center at the Great Wall, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, or Rome. Yes, there are museums in the areas that serve some of the same functions but they are usually little more than tourist traps. Of course, information about these foreign sites is available in book form, but for most of us, visitor centers are vastly superior to books for providing a quick overview. So why is it that American sites have such excellent visitor centers? Is it simply a matter of wealth? Maybe the people and governments of China, Egypt, India and Italy cannot afford expensive visitor centers. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that in our capitalistic country where nothing gets in the way of making money - where we have historically chopped down our forests, ripped up the prairies, and killed anything that is edible - we also have the best parks in the world with impressive visitor centers. It seems almost schizophrenic that the same culture that destroyed our forests and created the dust bowl could also have the foresight to preserve the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. Would it be a fair analogy to compare our culture to the man who smashes his wife in the face then picks her up and expresses his heart-felt apologies - only to smash her in the face again later? Hmmm!
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