Walking in America's Henge

Carlyle Dam West Campsite

Pat at first level of the Monk's Mound at Cahokia

Pat at the TOP of the Mound

Stefani behind her are the stockades that the Cahokia ancients built to protect some of the City of the Sun

Pat within the circle.

Before our walk within the Henge

Walking in America’s Henge~  Cahokia Mounds (UNESCO World Heritage Site)

Just about the time Mesa Verde was inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples and Europe was in its Medieval Period, City of the Sun with some 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants was thriving just east of today’s St. Louis in Illinois, near where the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers meet.  The place is called Cahokia Mounds after a tribe of Illiniwek Indigenous Peoples who lived there in the 1600s when a group of French Trappist Monks came. The society it is amazing and as sophisticated as the Mayan and Aztec Civilizations.   The Interpretative Center is GREAT explaining not only what archeologist found and understand about the society and civilization but exactly how they determined what they know! Just expertly demonstrated through life size dioramas and exhibits.  Check out http://www.cahokiamounds.org/

70 of the once 120 earth mounds built by digging dirt from “borrow pits” with stone and wood tools and transported in baskets woven from cattails and shredded red cedar carried most likely by slave labor rise above the flat land  to astonishing  heights and are protected within the World Heritage Site by the State of Illinois.  As much as 100 feet, the highest Monks Mound, a flattop mound for the principal leader to live on and rule all he could see, contains an estimated 22 million cubic feet of earth, an incredible science and engineering feat.  It overlooks what use to be Cahokian agricultural fields and villages. The other mounds are conical and pyramid like and mark the burial of the “elite” ones and mark also important boundaries and locations.  Excavations of Mound 72, a ridgetop or pyramid shape mound revealed 300 ceremonial burials, at least one important male 45 years old at death and a few others, but mostly young women remains with many grave offerings.

But what captured my imagination was “Woodhenge” because science and math and the spiritual combine at the place where five circular sun calendars were constructed over and over from 1100-1200 AD. Certain of the wooden posts parts found one year because of intense archeology trying to save the area from the modern day construction of a new Interstate align with Spring and Fall equinoxes and Winter and Summer solstices. Pat and I both walked the circle in reverence for all life and connections. They were scientists those long ago ancients.

We are resting today at probably one of the best campgrounds this wayfarin journey, an Army Corps of Engineer campground 50 miles east of Cahokia Mounds at Carlyle Lak It has over 20 miles of bike trails, a beautiful marina full of sailboats and WIFI. We haven’t watched TV all summer, but rain storms kept us inside and Pat found Downton Abbey, a Masterpiece PBS series which we can watch by “streaming”.  He found it because of reference to the sinking of the Titanic.  I am afraid we are addicted (he says he isn’t but you know men they can’t admit to things so frivolous.)  We watched all season 1 and now are into season 2.

The rainstorms out here are scary, got to go.  Love to all, see you soon.