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.
Surprising that there hasn't been any follow-up.
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
Neat map here, some more info- but from 1999.
They found a hellacious cache of stone celts nearby, up in O'Fallon, I believe. One of them was HUGE. Most were unfinished.
An interesting theory being bounced around now is that the great shell finds at Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma and other places might actually have been made in the Cahokia area and traded. The reason is that the Cahokia region has all the hallmarks of what passed for industry at the time- microdrills everywhere, unfinished goods, broken items that appeared to have been damaged in manufacture before being completed, large caches of blanks or unfinished items, while the Spiro region has plenty of finished products and virtually no worn tools or microdrills. There will definitely be a lot of new discoveries coming out of this area.
They haven't done too much more with the finding of limestone up in the mound, but it is interesting. There are so many sites being destroyed every year in that area that it is all they can do to get to them, much less get involved with the big mound. John Kelly is an archaeologist spearheading an effort to salvage local sites before they are lost... he has something called the Powell Archaeological Research Center, names after the fantastic great mound destroyed in the last century by dorks looking for fill dirt. If you are interested in the research going on in this area, he is the right guy to get in contact with. Check out this page with details on current research: