The sun rises over the mounds at Cahokia, a state historic site in Collinsville, Illinois, just across the river from St. Louis. LSA archaeologist Robin Beck is here today, looking toward the future but also remembering a moment from the recent past.
A couple of years ago, Beck and his team held a workshop at Cahokia, the largest precolonial settlement in what is now the United States. They invited representatives from tribal nations that have strong historical and contemporary ties to this land. Beck and his team were excited about a recent National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to survey the land. But the tenor of the conversation quickly grew tense.
One of the tribal representatives, Dr. Andrea A. Hunter, serves as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of The Osage Nation. Dr. Hunter—who holds a doctorate in anthropology with an expertise in archaeology—had some misgivings about the manner in which the archaeologists failed to discuss their research plans with the tribes in advance of seeking funding. While the project was touted as non-invasive, there were major concerns about the fact that the researchers did not ask the tribes if they wanted their sacred site exploited, regardless of whether the work was invasive or not, Dr. Hunter says. There were also concerns about the researchers sharing their findings with the public. Dr. Hunter, like many other Indigenous people, had observed in their histories a tendency to exploit the knowledge of sacred sites without asking for permission from the tribes to work on their significant sites or giving back to the people who called them home.
Dr. Hunter looked Beck and the other visiting archaeologists in the eye and asked: “If we don’t want this, will you leave?”
Beck and the rest of the team sat silently for a moment. “It brought us down to Earth pretty quickly,” recalls Beck, LSA professor of anthropology, and associate director and curator of Eastern North American archaeology at the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA).
Gaining a better understanding of Cahokia had long been a dream for Beck and his former grad student Casey Barrier (Ph.D. ’14), associate professor of anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, who had completed his dissertation work at a Mississippian site several miles south of Cahokia.
Long since abandoned after its inhabitants left during the 14th century CE, Cahokia—often called Native North America’s first city—has served as a focal point for archaeologists and living descendants alike.What remains of Cahokia lies under a sprawling state park, and one of the problems that archaeologists face is how to effectively study a site so large—around 2,200 acres.
Beck and the rest of the team sat silently for a moment. “It brought us down to Earth pretty quickly,” recalls Beck, LSA professor of anthropology, and associate director and curator of Eastern North American archaeology at the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA).
Gaining a better understanding of Cahokia had long been a dream for Beck and his former grad student Casey Barrier (Ph.D. ’14), associate professor of anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, who had completed his dissertation work at a Mississippian site several miles south of Cahokia.
Long since abandoned after its inhabitants left during the 14th century CE, Cahokia—often called Native North America’s first city—has served as a focal point for archaeologists and living descendants alike. What remains of Cahokia lies under a sprawling state park, and one of the problems that archaeologists face is how to effectively study a site so large—around 2,200 acres.
Cahokia Mounds is the largest precolonial settlement north of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The site was home to up to 20,000 people at its peak while it was in use during the Mississippian period (circa 1000-1350 CE). At various points in its development, the inhabitants of Cahokia built 120 enormous earthen mounds, around 80 of which still survive. The largest of these, called Monks Mound, has similar base dimensions to the largest of the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, and required a whopping 22 million cubic feet of dirt and clay to build.
Excavation as a practice is both expensive and destructive, and many Indigenous communities have voiced their discomfort with the irreparable damage it can cause to sites with sacred and historical significance to them. Beck and his colleagues developed an archaeological project that would use new technologies to help them understand Cahokia at a very large scale without the costs and harms of excavation. They also needed to hear what the tribal nations had to say.
Beck and Barrier teamed up with Ed Henry, associate professor of anthropology at Colorado State University, and archaeologist Tim Horsley in 2016. Because excavation necessarily destroys the archaeological record, they wanted to use geophysics to think about an entirely different dataset. Henry and Horsley could use a magnetometer to scan the entirety of Cahokia, allowing the researchers to answer questions about population density, architectural layout, and urbanization. “Employing the technologies of geophysics opens up a whole realm of anthropological research questions that were previously impossible for archaeologists to do,” Barrier explains.
At the LSA-funded workshop at Cahokia in October 2023, Beck and his teammates met with representatives from many tribes: The Osage Nation, Quapaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Ponca, Gun Lake Tribe of the Potawatomi, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Miami, and Peoria.
Cahokia Mounds is the largest precolonial settlement north of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). The site was home to up to 20,000 people at its peak while it was in use during the Mississippian period (circa 1000-1350 CE). At various points in its development, the inhabitants of Cahokia built 120 enormous earthen mounds, around 80 of which still survive. The largest of these, called Monks Mound, has similar base dimensions to the largest of the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, and required a whopping 22 million cubic feet of dirt and clay to build.
Excavation as a practice is both expensive and destructive, and many Indigenous communities have voiced their discomfort with the irreparable damage it can cause to sites with sacred and historical significance to them. Beck and his colleagues developed an archaeological project that would use new technologies to help them understand Cahokia at a very large scale without the costs and harms of excavation. They also needed to hear what the tribal nations had to say.
Beck and Barrier teamed up with Ed Henry, associate professor of anthropology at Colorado State University, and archaeologist Tim Horsley in 2016. Because excavation necessarily destroys the archaeological record, they wanted to use geophysics to think about an entirely different dataset. Henry and Horsley could use a magnetometer to scan the entirety of Cahokia, allowing the researchers to answer questions about population density, architectural layout, and urbanization. “Employing the technologies of geophysics opens up a whole realm of anthropological research questions that were previously impossible for archaeologists to do,” Barrier explains.
At the LSA-funded workshop at Cahokia in October 2023, Beck and his teammates met with representatives from many tribes: The Osage Nation, Quapaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Ponca, Gun Lake Tribe of the Potawatomi, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Miami, and Peoria.
They paused for a beat after Dr. Hunter raised her question, then asked whether they could confer privately in the hall. They talked about the importance of doing this work the right way. When they returned to the room, Beck recalls, “we said, ‘If you think our work is a sacrilege to the site, then we will end it, effective immediately.’”
That avowal allowed the conversation to continue. The archaeologists and tribal representatives went on to talk about the kind of data the tribal nations might be interested in. The team stressed that they would involve the tribes as consultants and collaborators, sharing biannual reports with them and incorporating their knowledge in academic papers.
Reflecting upon the roundtable now, Beck says he has tremendous respect for Dr. Hunter and her question. “I told her that I can’t go home and explain to my kids what I’m doing if I know I’m doing it against your wishes,” he says.
The conversation highlights the team’s approach to this project, as well as a sea change in the field of archaeology. Their approaches marked major shifts in technology and human relationships alike. “If we were doing this project 15 years ago, we wouldn’t have had this discussion,” Barrier says. “But it does feel like we’re entering a different moment. It’s not just a matter of informing people about what we’re going to do—it’s a matter of figuring out how we can do it together.”
In the early days of archaeology, and extending through the 19th and into the 20th centuries, archaeologists had a standard approach to excavation: demolition. One blew up nine layers of archaeological data with dynamite at ancient Troy, while another stripped the Parthenon of its ancient Greek sculptures. They then took the choicest artifacts back to their home countries to display in museums—including at U-M.
The field took a particularly heinous turn in the United States. Federal and state governments forcibly removed Native Americans from their lands before the Civil War and then, a century later, turned the sites into attractions for automobile tourists. “You could drive from Illinois to North Carolina to Florida to Wisconsin and see close to two dozen archaeological sites where Native American graves had been opened and exposed,” Beck says. “All that clout—the political, cultural, and the economic clout—was on the side of the archaeologists.”
Jean Dennison, professor of American Indian studies at the University of Washington and a citizen of The Osage Nation, researches the ways in which Indigenous peoples negotiate and contest the ongoing settler colonial process. She recognizes “a long, devastating history of researchers answering questions for themselves, even when they think they’re answering benign questions that aren’t political.” She points out that “they’re not asking the questions that [Indigenous] communities care about. They’re doing deeply, deeply colonial work.”
So what could the Cahokia archaeologists do in the face of the legacy they had inherited and did not want to perpetuate? By the time the team began studying the site, researchers at Cahokia were expanding beyond conventional archaeological methods to include new, non-invasive techniques such as magnetometry and radar, just not to the extent that Beck and his teammates envisioned.
Methodologically, they had a few questions. “Given its scale, how can any of us understand a place like Cahokia through an excavation area?” Beck wondered. “It tells us only a small part of the story.” Besides, traditional excavation required an immense number of resources, particularly for a site so large.
In 2022, the team put together an application for a five-year, $312,000 grant from the NSF—resources that they needed to conduct the largest archaeo-geophysical survey in the Americas. The goal was nothing short of astounding: to create a map of the entire underground complex that was accurate within a half-centimeter, using essentially what was a giant metal detector. When they received the grant, they immediately began reaching out to tribal representatives before jumping into data collection. It would take more than a year to plan and organize the workshop and roundtable at Cahokia, but in the meantime they began the long process of fieldwork, meticulously towing 16 magnetometers strung together behind an all-terrain vehicle.
By the time they complete the survey, they will have collected a staggering 1.5 billion data points. Cahokia might reveal its secrets, at long last—and all without damaging the site.
During a sunny week in October 2024, this magazine’s photographer flew a drone around the site, capturing the mounds’ shadows at sundown. On Monks Mound, people of all stripes, some wearing headphones, some chatting with companions and walking dogs, strolled the site at dusk. From the top of the mound, one could see country roads abutting fallow fields, the backlit Gateway Arch, and the massive floodplain stretching to the horizon, flocks of birds rising in the distance.
A visitor could easily imagine a tropey History Channel special set to swelling orchestral music, with a booming narrator’s voice describing the grand enigma of a vanishing civilization! Who were the mysterious inhabitants of Cahokia? Why did they disappear?
But for The Osage Nation, Cahokia represents something different. For one thing, the Osage ancestors did not disappear; they simply picked up and moved on. “Observing the world around us—and making changes based on that—has been a fundamental part of who we’ve always been,” Dennison explains. “Cahokia was one of those steps.”
She understands the pull of the site, the sense of awe it evokes. “It is a powerful space, not just because the earth was changed,” Dennison says. “There’s power there, and it’s important to name that.”
Beck, his teammates, and many of their colleagues recognize that consultation and collaboration are the future of American archaeology. “If undergraduates think that the field of archaeology is opposed to or antithetical to Indigenous peoples and communities anywhere in the world, they’re not going to take our classes,” he says. “Why would they? We’re relics at that point.” He stresses that Indigenous people’s roles in academic archaeology are and must be not just matters of consent, but of active participation.
The work of Dennison and Dr. Hunter, The Osage Nation’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, moves both parallel to and in tandem with traditional academic research. These days, Dennison and her students are thinking about how their research will ensure that the Osage can continue to be Osage for generations to come. While academia often focuses on questions of objectivity and taxonomy, Dennison’s questions are about thriving in the future: for example, how the Osage can learn and advance study of their language.
Now three years into their five-year NSF grant, the archaeological team has scanned more than four square kilometers of the site. They are identifying dense clusters of houses, temples, and mounds, which define a different kind of city: a Native American one. Beck and his teammates are also trying to change the traditional narrative, attempting to understand the site in its own right and not according to old models better suited to Babylon or the Acropolis. “Cahokia is something that is sui generis,” Beck says.
But will the story change? Dennison looks forward to the future: “I don’t think we can tell different stories until we have different storytellers.”
Scan image: Stauffer, J. Grant, Seth B. Grooms, Lorraine W. Hu, Joy Mersmann, Tristram R. Kidder, and Edward R. Henry. 2023 Reimagining the Development of Downtown Cahokia Using Remote Sensing Visualizations from the Western Edge of the Grand Plaza. Land 12(2):342.
Jean Dennison photography by Jeff Ritter
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| Release Date: | 05/09/2025 |
|---|---|
| Category: | Faculty; Alumni |
| Tags: | Anthropology; LSA Magazine; Social Sciences; Archaeology; Stephanie Wong |
