Cahokia Mounds

Students observe the physical and human geography of the Mississippi flood plain from the top of the main mound at Cahokia. An ox-bow lake can be seen to on the right side of the picture, and behind it is a glimpse of the Mississippi River with St. Louis in the distance.

Almost a thousand years ago, 20,000 people lived at a place called Cahokia. At the center of their city, was the largest artificial mound in North America. A large part of Cahokia’s success is surely its location: near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers — just across the Mississippi from modern-day St. Louis. Yet less than 400 years later (see timeline) the city was abandoned, and no one is quite sure what happened.

Our middle and high school took a trip out to Cahokia last month. It was during the same intercession between quarters when we visited the Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Da Vinci Exhibition, and did our brief biological survey of the campus.

The elevation of the main mound, sitting on the flat Mississippi flood plain, with the St. Louis skyline in the distance, was a great place to talk about the importance of physical geography in the location of cities (your biggest cities are always going to be on rivers, or the ocean or, often, both) and to reflect on how history repeats itself — a once thriving metropolis is nothing now but displaced piles of alluvium and mystery.


View Cahokia in a larger map

Cahokia is a World Heritage Site, and it has an excellent museum. I particularly liked the detail in their life-sized reconstruction of a section of the city.

Their website is also good. Apart from the timeline, mentioned above, they have a nice interactive map for details about each of the numerous mounds, and a long page about the archeology.

The site is pretty big, so you can spend a fair amount of time exploring. Fall, when the leaves have turned color, and the air has cooled a little, is an excellent time to visit.

Students explore the trails at Cahokia.

Becoming Da Vinci

Notes (by Natasha D.,"aged" and reflected) from our visit to the DaVinci Exhibit.

Working models of Leonardo Da Vinci’s devices, and video of his sketchbook, so inspired one student that she emulated Da Vinci’s style as she took her notes during our visit to the Da Vinci Machines Exhibition. While I’d asked them to bring their notebooks, I’d not said anything about taking notes (nor is there to be a quiz afterward) so it was very nice to see this student’s efforts. The exhibition is in St. Louis at the moment, until the end of the year.

Scan of a page of the Codex de Leicester by Leonardo DaVinci. (Image via Wikimedia Commons).
Flywheel using spherical weights. Constructed based on Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. Photo by Erik Möller via Wikimedia Commons.

What I liked most about the exhibit is that you can operate some of the reconstructions of flywheels, gears, pulleys, catapults, and other machines that came out of DaVinci’s notebooks.

Da Vinci did a lot with gears, inclined planes, pulleys and other combination of simple machines, so the exhibit is a nice introduction to mechanics in physics. The exhibition provides a teacher’s guide that’s useful in this regard.

It’s an excellent exhibition, especially if you spend some time playing with the machines.