A Stone Pyramid At Cahokia, Illinois

Archaeologists have made an astonishing discovery at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site: what appears to be a large stone structure beneath the site's biggest earthen mound.

The site was discovered accidentally Jan. 24 during drilling to construct a water-drainage system within Monks Mound, the largest Indian mound north of Mexico and the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the New World.

"This is astounding," said William Woods, an archaeologist with Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, who is leading the investigation of the mystery structure. "It's so unexpected that it would never have entered your mind before."

The stone is at least 32 feet (10 meters) long in one of its dimensions. It is buried about 40 feet below the surface of a terrace on the western side of Monks Mound and well above the mound's bottom. Researchers believe it may be made of cobbles or slabs of limestone or sandstone.

Even if the apparent structure turns out to be no larger than this, it would be a dramatic find. Stone does not occur naturally at Cahokia (which is the Mississippi River valley about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis, Missouri--J.T.) so any stone would have had to be brought by humans. Stone is uncommon at excavations there.

"There's no question this is a unique discovery," said Melvin Fowler, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "It's totally unexpected."

Fowler, reached by telephone in his office Friday, is widely considered the godfather of Cahokia archaeology.

Cahokia Mounts is the largest archaeological site in the United States and has the biggest mounds and the greatest number of mounds anywhere. The site is named for a sub-tribe of Illini Indians who lived there when the French arrived in the 1600s. At its peak around 1100 A.D., the area was covered with a community of 20,000 people.

The mystery was discovered about 10 o'clock on a cold, windy Saturday morning amid snow flurries as workers drilled into the western side of the mound.

Andy Martignoni Jr. and Steve Fulton, both SIUE archaeologists, were on duty at the site when the drill operator reported hitting a rock about 140 feet into the side of the hill. He drilled on, but the drill bit broke after cutting through about 32 feet of rock. Martignonia and Fulton talked the situation over for a few minutes.

"We talked about a possible drain, a tomb, al kinds of wild stuff," Martignoni said. Comparing the 'feel' of the drill with countless other operations, the drill operator told them the structure seemed to be made of large stones apparently placed together.

Martignoni called Woods, who had just gone to bed after staying up all night writing a report.

"You won't believe this," Martignoni told him. "We hit some stone at Monks Mound."

Woods and his collegues plan to investigate the finding this summer without harming the mound. Investigative techniques to be used will include seismic waves, drilling and testing for electromagnetic impulses.

(See the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for March 9, 1998, "Cahokia mounds finding stuns archeologists -- A large stone under the site's biggest mound may be a man-made structure," by William Allen, Post-Dispatch Science Writer.

(Found this)

Monks Mound Update

By Bill Iseminger
December, 1999

To recap the story about "the stone in the mound," in 1998, contractors were drilling from ground level horizontally into the west side of Monks Mound to install drains to relieve the internal water that was causing severe slumping. In one of the transects, the drill operator went through 32 feet of stone, approximately 150 feet into the mound and some 40 feet below the present surface of the Second Terrace.
The operator told archaeologists from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE) who were monitoring the project, that it felt like cobbles of soft stone (such as limestone or sandstone), based on his experience in other drilling projects. How far the stone mass extended in other directions was unknown.
Subsequently, SIUE under Dr. William Woods, and SIU-Carbondale, under Dr. John Sexton conducted a series of remote sensing tests, using magnetometry and electronic resistivity, hoping to determine something about the dimensions of the stone mass. However, those tests were inconclusive as the stone was apparently deeper than these methods would penetrate. The magnetometry did show two linear anomalies about 20 meters apart and apparently above the stone, but what they are is unclear at this time. SIUE did hand auger down over 30 feet and did not hit the stone but did hit a water saturated layer (the water actually rose 10 feet in the hole) and below that a dense black clay which had a lot of compacted organic matter. This may represent a clay mound over the stone that eventually had some vegetation cover.

A target of opportunity occurred in mid-December, 1999, when a coring rig from Madison, Wisconsin became available for one day for some vertical coring, operated by Michael Kolb and Andy Jalbert. They first tried to drill through the bottom of the old auger hole, but the water and soil that had collapsed into it, making it impossible to drill properly. They came back and spent a half day drilling a new core and got down 43 feet, but did not encounter stone. They did get a couple feet into the dense black clay at the elevation where the stone was expected and may be just above it.
Unfortunately, the drilling team had to get back to Wisconsin and could not take the hour or two needed to go down a few more feet, so that will have to wait until a future date.

Despite the disappointment, important information was retrieved as a soil column was recovered which will provide information about the stratigraphy and soils of that part of the mound. Future remote sensing tests are planned that should penetrate deeper into the mound and hopefully reveal information about the size and shape of the stone mass. We will keep you updated when this takes place.

Monks Mound Update 2000

Monks Mound: SIU Edwardsville continued its program of trying to understand more about Monks Mound, following up on work they began with the repairs to the west slump and the installation of the new stairs up the front over the past few years.

Dr. William Woods led the project, which involved field school students from SIUE, SIU Carbondale under Dr. John Sexton, and also students from the University of Goettingen, Germany. Most of their project at Cahokia focused on the First Terrace of Monks Mound to test the hypothesis of its being a late addition to the front of the mound. They also are trying to identify other possible features, such as structures or pits, that lie below the surface.

Excavations during the 1960s-70s had identified historic period (mid 1700s) occupation, burials and a French chapel location on the west side of the First Terrace, all relating to an occupation by Illini (Illinois) Indians long after the Mississippians had left. The testing for the new stairway in the late 1990s also identified some large refuse pits near the center of this terrace, full of the remains of deer, bear, turtles, swans, fish, and other animals, as well as French period ceramics, gun parts, glass and knives. Recently, SIUE and SIUC have been using resistivity and other methods on the eastern portion of this terrace to see if they can identify additional features.

They also have been taking vertical cores across the terrace. The preliminary results seem to confirm that the First Terrace was indeed a late addition to the front of the mound, based on detected soil changes and angles of slope. The other resistivity test results are still being analyzed, but it will be interesting to see what they determine. No additional testing was done in the area of the stone mass under the Second Terrace, due to time and equipment restraints, but some work may be done this fall.

The idea that Cahokia was a much more ancient site than it appears is not really recent. Finding stone structures UNDER the current mound is not unexpected

Unfortunately for researchers, there's a whole school of paleo-Indian archaeology out there who really don't want anybody finding Chinese stuff down there, but that's exactly what they are going to find because, as serious students know, when DeSoto came to Angel Mounds and then Cahokia, the resident Indians in that area were the Sioux and their brethren. These Indians used a sign language which uses the human body to form characters identical to those found in the remains of the Shang state in China.

See my post at #8 on http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/632079/ posts for my last most recent reference to this.

Oh, yes, you can start reading all about DeSoto at http://www.floridahistory.com/kentucky.html

And those characters - a brief is located at http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/focnews/August-97/0023.html

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