Archaeologists in East St. Louis, Illinois, dig to find an ancient civilization that vanished.

The largest excavation of a prehistoric site in the country is poised to solve a riddle about Illinois prehistory that has lingered for a century — where did the Mississippians (the Indigenous People) go? And why?

The Mississippian culture was a mound-building civilization of indigenous people that flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 1600 AD to 800 AD, varying regionally.

An enormous dig of a village site in 2011 first inhabited about 1000 A.D. on 78 acres of what used to be the St. Louis National Stock Yards Company [1]. The stockyards company built 'National City, a small town for its employees, just 2 miles north of East St. Louis, Illinois. The site is providing so much data and so many artifacts that archaeologists are daring to speculate that basic questions about the indigenous people may finally be answered.

The St. Louis National Stockyards Company.

The indigenous people, whose pottery and building styles identify them as a single cultural group, lived in or near the Mississippi Valley more than 1100 years ago. They erected complex cities, built enormous mounds for ritualistic purposes, and disappeared in the space of about 200-300 years.

But the stockyards dig, known as the "East St. Louis site," was abandoned by the indigenous people after only 150 years.

This site is 8 miles west of the region's main group of mounds, now the grounds of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site near Collinsville, which was occupied for about another 150 years after they left the East St. Louis site. However, less than 1% of the Cahokia Mounds site has been excavated because of a policy that the area should be reserved for future study.

But the East St. Louis village site will be fully excavated.

"By 1200 AD, the indigenous people are gone from this site with no evidence of any other occupation," said archaeologist Patrick Durst about the dig at the old stockyards. Durst, of the Prairie Research Institute of the University of Illinois at Champaign, supervises 90 hired diggers.

"What happened to them is one of the research questions we're hoping to answer. Having an opportunity to completely investigate a major portion of a site, this large is almost unheard of. When we are finished with this project, more of the East St. Louis mound group and the complex associated with it will have been excavated than all of Cahokia," says Durst.

One of the questions is whether the people who lived in the East St. Louis village site were the same people who lived at the much larger Cahokia Mounds site.

"We're trying to identify how this community, and its large mound center, relates to Cahokia, the largest mound center," Durst said, "We don't know exactly the direct relationships between these groups. It could be different groups that didn't necessarily work together. We don't necessarily think they were enemies, but they may not be the exact same cultural groups."

For residents of Southern and central Illinois, the ancient indigenous people represent a presence that turns up in daily life, from the "birdman" symbol etched into state highway overpasses to the term "Cahokia."

The Real Cahokia "Birdman Tablet."

But what is still unknown is: Where did they come from and what happened to them? Did they die off, or did they become the "Indians" of more modern times?

The small army of diggers has been working since 2008 to finish this excavation by the end of the year. This area, once home to 3,000 people who lived 500 years before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, lies in the path of the New Mississippi River Bridge Project (rebuilding a new Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge beginning in August of 2018) and must be excavated or lost to bulldozers. Less than a mile away near St. Clair Avenue, construction crews are already repaving roads that will lead to the bridge.

For archaeologists, this location is significant because it would have been the first habitation seen by visitors in prehistoric times to this region as they cruised down a much wider and shallower Mississippi River in dugout canoes. The village would have been in the path of native people headed for the Cahokia Mounds ritual center 8 miles further inland.

Durst speculated that from the river, the village would have been an awesome sight easily visible because the years of habitation would have deforested the slope leading from the rivers-edge. Hundreds of smoke plumes from campfires would have filled the horizon. And marker poles, which were tree trunks set upright in the ground and possibly containing forbidding carvings of gods or animals, warned visitors that they were entering a place where highly civilized people ruled.

Artifacts usually found in other states, including pieces of finely decorated pottery from Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa and beads carved from shells from the Gulf of Mexico, are being found almost daily. These discoveries support a long-held theory that the entire Cahokia area was the center of a culture that built mounds throughout the Midwest and southeastern United States.

A 6-inch high stone statue of a kneeling woman holding a conch shell was found in 2010. It is believed to be one of only a few that are known to exist.

Durst said that the sheer amount of data being collected all from one place is likely to lead to answers to basic questions about the indigenous people.

A smaller but very artifact-rich, nearby site just east of Brooklyn, Illinois, called "Janey B. Goode," was excavated in the early 2000s. Durst said that it contained about 800 features. A feature can be the remains of a dwelling or communal structure, a waste pit, fireplace or hearth or the dark stains in the earth where large, log-like poles were placed upright in the ground.

But the larger East St. Louis site has more than 2,500 features, including the remains of 500 dwellings, although many more ancient homesites might remain buried, Durst said.

"How and when this urban commercial and ritual center all came together and what caused it to fall apart is what we want to answer," said Brad Koldehoff, an archaeologist and cultural resources director for the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). The dig is a joint effort by the Illinois State Archaeological Survey and IDOT.

Koldehoff said that the village's abandonment might have been a result of the overexploitation of animals and plants. While the indigenous people depended on fishing and growing a primitive type of corn and other vegetables, like squash and beans, they needed firewood and meat from game animals to augment their diet.

"Staying in one place too long almost sets you up to fail," Koldehoff said.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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[1] National City was a suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois. Incorporated in 1907, it was a company town for the St. Louis National Stock Yards Company. In 1996, the company, which owned all residential property in the town, evicted all of its residents. The following year, because it had no residents, National City was dissolved by a court order. Its site was subsequently annexed by nearby Fairmont City, Illinois.

[2] The Birdman Tablet was discovered in 1971 during excavations at the base of the eastern side of Monks Mound, conducted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Archaeologists theorize that the bird of prey on the front of the tablet symbolically represents the Upper World. The Middle World (of man) is represented by the human figure wearing the costume, and the Lower World is represented by the snakeskin pattern found on the back of the tablet.