If I could, I’d take myself back through time and space and land somewhere around 1100 AD near modern day St. Clair county, Illinois where the ancient city of Cahokia bustled at the peak of it’s power with a population between 10,200 and 15,300. Today, all that remains of the largest metropolis of the Mississippian societies is a series of large earthen mounds towering above the monocultures of corn and soy that dominate the midwest of North America today.
I wonder what that city would have looked like in its prime — the vast deciduous forests of the midwest and east means that the structures would have been built of wood and other degradable materials. It’s not like the abandoned Puebloan cities in Utah and New Mexico, you can’t climb the cliffs and sit within the homes, only stand atop the grassy mounds and look out over what would have been the sprawling expanse of the city. Now nothing, gone but for the incredible feats of engineering moving 55 million cubic feet of earth into flat-topped mounds.
The goods they left behind speak of an expanse of trade on par with those colonial cities that established themselves some 300 years following the decline and abandonment of Cahokia. Copper plates depicting man and animal, stone reliefs, carved seashells, potsherds, cemeteries remain in the rich earth beneath. We’ve reconstructed their massive woodhenges from hollows in the dirt, mapped the footprint of circular dwellings stretching out for miles from the city center, tracked the evidence of two massive floods and the steps these people took to mitigate them through channels and dikes. And yet, all of this is only visible to those with an archaeological eye.
These people never wrote down their methods, we don’t know much about how they built their houses. What did they eat for a quick bite at the market? What kind of things could you pick up as souvenirs? People would have come from miles away, looking for a new start in the big city 1000 years ago.
I would give anything to walk those streets, hear the lost languages, know those people as they were. I want to see what wonders they wrought of wood, what a back alley of Cahokia feels like, sit on a park bench and eat some street food lost to time. Curse the inexorable march of time.
from the pen of icarus blake 
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