On the rainy day of May, after saw the impressive Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch and tried toast ravioli in central St Louis, I drove to Collinsville, Illinois to see the World Heritage Site, Cahokia Mounds. After got out from highway, I entered the archaeological zone. The road signs to Woodhenge and the gigantic Monks Mound were clearly visible along the route, but I decided to visit the museum and interpretive center first in order to get deeper understanding on Cahokia. Despite the rain, the carpark of the museum was surprisingly almost full.

Inside the museum, there was a very good replica of ancient village that show how ancient people of Cahokia lived. The story of sun worshipper society was a little Inca-liked to me, but still very interesting to know the existence of Mississippian culture which I have never heard before. The museum was indeed very nice, too bad that my visit happened to be in the same time of school trip, so the place was very noisy and full with children who did their school trip reports. Because of the rain, there were no children allowed to walk outside the museum, so to avoid the crowd I decided to walk along the trail to see the mounds. The walk really reminded me Gyeongju’s Tumuli Park with big and small mounds in the park. The twin mounds were maybe the most interesting one for its bigger size. Along the trail, I could see the Monks Mounds but there was no route from the museum to the great mound, so I backed to my car and drove to the site instead. The Monks Mound was the most impressive sight of Cahokia, the ground size was truly remarkable and larger that the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan I saw last year. I had to admit that the engineering of ancient Cahokia people was a real world wonder. According to the information in the museum, the Monks Mound was the platform for residence of priests or chieftain palace that carried sun worshipping ceremony. As mentioned by other reviewers, the view on top of Monks Mound was quite nice, even with shower rain, I still could see the view of downtown St Louis. When I walked back to carpark the rain became heavier and heavier, so that I decided to cancel my idea to see Woodhenge and better backed to St Louis.

It was a nice two hours visit to Cahokia. The site was very interesting as the Mississippian culture was quite unknown. I surprised to learn the news of financial problem of the site. The problem seems to be that the site located in Illinois, not Missouri. Most of visitors to Cahokia are actually come from Missouri, I talked with the students and their school are in St Louis and there is no fee to visit the place, so Cahokia relies only on budget from Illinois, and the Missourians don’t fully want to provide financial support to help other historical site in other state! It would be a shame that the interpretive center has to close down in certain period of year as without this center to explain, visiting Cahakia will be totally lost in understanding of this site’s outstanding universal value. At last I don’t know why our regular reviewers, Ian Cade and Kyle Magnuson, picked the almost similar photos of Monks Mound but in different season, summer and autumn! Well I decided to continue this nice practice with the similar one but in the rainy late spring version!