Cracked.com has a piece entitled 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America, wherein #5 talks about the complexity of native civilization and talks about Monks Mound in Cahokia, Illinois.
The author laments:
So why does Egypt get millions of dollars of tourism and Time Life documentaries dedicated to their boring old sand pyramids, while you didn’t even know about the giant blue, red, white, black, gray, brown and orange testament to engineering and human willpower just outside of St. Louis? Well, because the Egyptians know how to treat one of the Eight Wonders of the World. America, on the other hand, appears to be trying to figure out how to turn it into a parking lot.
However, the author had previously described the location of the settlement as:
One of the best examples of how we got Native Americans all wrong is Cahokia, a massive Native American city located in modern day East St. Louis.
This just in: Although Cahokia lies in Illinois east of St. Louis, it is not in East St. Louis. East St. Louis is a city just across the river from St. Louis, and its name is a punchline in films almost to the level of Detroit. It’s rough, downtrodden, and crime-ridden. In East St. Louis, they have a problem with car radios being stolen from police cars, okay?
Cahokia is a town some miles away and it’s safe to visit. If it were in East St. Louis, East St. Louisians would have stolen the dirt in Monks Mound, okay?
I’ve been on a couple of occasions. If you want a real mind-bender, some people posit that the mound builders of Cahokia might have traveled southwest and became, hundreds of years later, Toltecs. Although I forget where I read that.
