Cahokia Mounds in Fairmont City, Illinois, attracts a diverse group of history buffs, who are visiting one of North America’s most important historic sites, and fitness enthusiasts, who enjoy the cardiovascular challenge of the steep steps that climb to the top of so-called Monks Mound, the largest of the native earthworks in the Illinois state historic site.
If these stair-steppers would step a short way down the mown path that leads east from the parking lot next to the big mound, they could see history in the making – or in the rediscovering.
Friday was the last scheduled excavation day at an archaeological site atop a smaller mound situated in the field just east of the great mound. Corin Pursell is supervising a Washington University archaeological dig near the site of a major historical rarity – the only copper works located at a Native American location from the Mississippian culture that built the mounds at Cahokia.
“This is one of the most important sites in the eastern half of the United States,” Pursell said, pointing to what remains of the excavation into the former copper works.
Pursell – working under John E. Kelly of Washington University – has been retracing work done at the site by Greg Perino in 1956. Though Perino cooperated with subsequent researchers in handing over his maps and notes, his work methods on his dig were “not one of his finer moments,” Pursell said. That was why the current dig was needed to find Perino’s original dig site and verify and expand his findings.
Perino was a self-taught professional archaeologist from Belleville who cofounded the Illinois State Archaeological Society. An expert on Native American artifacts, he died July 4, 2005.
On the site where Pursell’s team finished excavating on Friday, Perino found a human structure that dates back to 1100-1200 AD, Pursell said. People built here with wood then, so the only remaining evidence of the structure are post holes and trenches from walls – a tremendous amount of imagination is needed in archaeology to get excited. Pursell, for one, sees a post hole and imagines the feasting of the Mississippian nobility.
“Given where it was, on top of this mound, it should have been a building for nobility,” Pursell said. “And Perino reported evidence from his dig that there was feasting here.”
The nobility partying hard on the earthen mound would have played some role in the copper works located just a few strides away, Pursell said. Right by the active dig site is the ruin of Perino’s 1956 excavation of what he thought – and Kelly’s team later confirmed – to be the only copper works on the continent at the time.
“Perino found evidence of a big ceremonial campfire with hundreds of tiny flecks of copper – more flecks of copper than he had ever seen anywhere, and Perino was experienced,” Pursell said. “The soil was stained with copper. He was pretty sure he had found a copper workshop.”
Perino decided to leave that important work for later researchers – an “excellent decision,” Pursell said, given Perino’s slipshod work at the site with bulldozer and shovel.
“We didn’t believe it was true, because there are no copper workshops in the Mississippian culture,” Pursell said. “But it turns out Perino was right. There was one – and this is it.”
Kelly’s team concluded that copper was imported to Cahokia from the Great Lakes and worked into artifacts here that were then exported all over the continent – and to some extent the world, given that copper figures were given as diplomatic gifts.
Pursell said, “That means all of the religious artifacts and diplomatic artifacts made of copper over a three-hundred-year period of our civilization were made right here.”
