Cahokia - Best Spot to Learn More about the Moundbuilders

I've already mentioned that I'm attending the JET (Journal of Economics Teaching) Conference in St. Louis - what I hadn't mentioned is that I'm not staying at the conference hotel downtown. One reason is the cost (especially if you drive - $50 a night parking fees are silly on top of $250/night for a room). The main reason, though, is that I usually prefer to engage more with the local area rather than just walk in a 2-3 block radius around a convention site. So when I was in Philly for NAEE this past March, I stayed in the northern suburbs and took the train into town each day. Same thing when I visited New York - I stayed in New Jersey and took bus or ferry like a normal commuter.

Here in St. Louis commuting via mass transit wasn't realistic, but I was able to reserve parking downtown for a reasonable amount. And I had a favorite hotel I've used a few times over the years - most recently for a couple of other conferences at the St. Louis Fed, but before that to visit the Cahokia State Historic Park on the east side of the Mississippi River not far from St. Louis. I wasn't able to stop this year (mostly cause of the weather - 100 degrees with 80% humidity the first day of the conference meant little non-essential physical activity!) but did drive by that area today for "old times sake". It reminded me how much I changed the start of my 7th grade social studies year after my first visit - no longer was I satisfied with the generic descriptions in textbooks of native American tribes as hunter/gatherers. Over the years I visited more moundbuilder sites in other areas - Great Serpent Mound and Mound City in Ohio, Poverty Point in NE Louisiana - but Cahokia was the easiest one to access on my way to other destinations. Today it is on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and has been depicted in documentaries more than almost any other pre-Columbian site.

Some of the resources I used to use on Cahokia (and a couple of new ones):

500 Nations video series, Episode 1 (I still have the DVD series for this one) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVwDAvWXz3g

Cahokia Mounds World Heritage and State Historic Site - https://cahokiamounds.org/

"Cahokia: City of the Sun" video (this is the one used at the Cahokia site) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6mONLw-Hgc&t=33s

"Cahokia: A Piece of Illinois History" - a unit written for 3rd to 5th graders in Illinois, but accesses good online resources for elementary teachers in other areas - https://sites.google.com/illinoisstatemuseum.org/educatorspage/indigenous-people

UNESCO World Heritage Convention site for Cahokia State Historic Park - https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/198/

"The Mystery of America's Lost City", Junior Scholastic, Nov 2023, https://junior.scholastic.com/issues/2023-24/110123/the-mystery-of-america-s-lost-city.html?language=english#920L

Other Moundbuilder Resources:

Hopewell Culture National Historic Park - https://www.nps.gov/places/hocu.htm

Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks - https://hopewellearthworks.org/

Indian Mounds of Northeast Louisiana (brochure in PDF) - https://www.crt.state.la.us/dataprojects/archaeology/moundsguide/downloads/DOA-Moundbook-200_final.pdf

The Moundbuilders' Art: A Confluence of 'Ingenuity, Industry, and Elegance', University of Saint Andrews (Scotland), https://openvirtualworlds.org/omeka/exhibits/show/moundbuildersart