Southernmost Illinois History

Mississippian Era - Cahokia Moundbuilders

While Europe was in the Dark Ages, and crusaders fought holy wars, a Native American culture thrived in Southwestern and Southernmost Southern Illinois. They were known as the Mississippian Moundbuilders. The mounds they built may have been based on worshipping the sun, and Cahokia was larger than London of its day, from 700-1300 A.D. That city was near the present Cahokia, which is just southeast of St. Louis.

The moundbuilders communities in the southeast quarter of the US had similar customs, and were fading out as the era of European exploration began, about 1500 AD.

Millstone Bluff

Southern Illinois University-Carbondale archeological investigations of Mississippian culture span Southern Illinois, including Millstone Bluff, northeast of Vienna near Robbs. (618-658-2111) “Millstone is an interpretive nature trail of a Mississippian period village. See  a cemetery, remains of a village and petroglyphs of a thunder bird, all perched on a high hill surrounded by an 80 foot bluff that pioneers used to carve out millstones.”

Rock art, petroglyphs, pictographys. JStor article

The (Millstone Bluff) village is built on an isolated, flat-topped hill rising like a mesa about 300 feet above the landscape. Their cornfields were some distance away, in the valley, and their water had to be hauled up from the base of the bluff. Yet archaeologists have turned up no real evidence of defensive concerns.

The cultural traits don't all originate in the same place, but they spread like wildfire right around A.D. 1000, everywhere from the Gulf Coast to the edges of Oklahoma -- Brian Butler, SIU-C

The Illinois State Museum has an overview of archaeology of Mississippian sites including Cahokia and Millstone Bluff.

UIUC: Mississippian pages

The culture thrived between 900 and 1550 A.D., according to the Mississippian Artifacts website. See its pages on flint instruments. Toolmaking was big business.

Mill Creek chert

Mill Creek is a tiny town on the Alexander-Union County line, between Jonesboro and Cairo. A millenium before Mill Creek had a post office, it had a huge mining operation in nearby hills, for chert. Webster's dictionary says chert is an impure, massive, flintlike quartz or hornstone, of a dull color or hornstone, a siliceous (silica) stone, a variety of quartz, closely resembling flint, but more brittle.

Some mining continues today near Mill Creek of silica, which is used in a variety of products such as cleaning powders, toothpaste and the plastic cases of telephones.

The hoe on the left was found in Jackson County, Illinois, and is made of Mill Creek chert. The picture is from the Mississippian Artifacts website. The hoe was strapped to a handle with leather binding.

An Illinois State Museum website says

"Hoes made from Mill Creek Chert were stronger and more durable than hoes previously made from shell or bone. In comparison to other nearby chert sources, Mill Creek appears to be ideal for hoe manufacture and use. Although other cherts are equally fine-grained, Mill Creek Chert occurs as relatively large tabular nodules, a shape well suited for the manufcture of broad bifaces.

"...large chert quarries in the Shawnee Hills and the movement of large volumes of Mill Creek chert into the American Bottom (continued) for several hundred years. No matter how these stone quarrying, trading, and hoe-making activities were organized -- be it specialized traders and hoe-making craftsmen (less likely), or individual farmers making yearly treks south to quarry and make their personal hoes (more likely), or down-the-line trading of complete hoes from village to village (always likely) -- chert mining and manufacture of chert hoes were clearly important to maize agriculture and to the Mississippian economy as a whole."

Kincaid Mounds

Kincaid Mounds details by John Schwegmann.

The Kincaid Mounds are east-southeast of Brookport, across the Ohio River from Paducah. About 19 of them rise about 30 feet above an otherwise flat riverbottom area along bow-shaped Avery Lake. Some of the mounds have been cleared in the past few years, with the help of Job Corps students. Other mounds appear to be clumps of trees. SIU archeologists continue investigating the area.

Archeologists can only speculate why the culture disappeared. One reason is lack of crop rotation, with continued growth of corn depleting the soil of nitrogen. Another may be unfriendly neighbors. Still another may be a slight drop in average temperature around 1400 AD.

These mounds are from the Mississippian period and flourished around the time of AD 1050 - 1400. Kincaid peaked around the year 1250, according to SIU's Butler.

Angel Mounds

The Angel Mounds near Evansville, IN are a Mississippian era tourist attraction.

Explorer Hernando DeSoto and crew explored the southeast US in 1540-1542. Some reports say they may have come as far north as Southernmost Illinois. DeSoto's explorations generally coincide with the decline of the Cahokian moundbuilders' civilization.

Native Americans - 12,000 years

University of Memphis Anthropologists say Native Americans have spent at least 12,000 years on the North American continent.

• Paleoindian Period (9500 - 8000 B.C.)
• Archaic Period (8000 - 1000 B.C.)
• Woodland Period (1000 B.C. - 900 A.D.)
• Mississippian Period (900 - 1550 A.D.)

Sketch of typical Mississippian village

Cahokia Mounds today photo & sketch - in its glory.

Moundville (Alabama) - second in size to Cahokia | Moundville pic today

Mounds along the Natchez Trace | Nile of the New World