The earliest dates of activity at the Kincaid Mounds in Massac County, Illinois, go back to 1050 A.D. It was once a large village, the capital of a Native American chiefdom, which existed until 1400 A.D., says John Schwegman of the Kincaid Mounds Support Organization. On Sounds Good, Austin Carter speaks with Schwegman about the Archaeology Field Day at the site this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Kincaid Mounds were once a walled city, where a chiefdom ruled over farming (primarily corn) villages sprawling 10 miles in different directions. The large mounds rise 30 feet and on them platforms exist today where buildings once sat. In past digs, they've identified a chief's house, council house and a temple that had a perpetual fire.
The Field Day talks are at 10 a.m., Noon and 2 p.m. where professional archaeologists from Southern Illinois Carbondale will give results of excavations at the site. The dig they did this past summer, where they excavated the workhouse of artisans who made jewelry out of fluorspar. SIU is in charge of the excavations at the site today, Schwegman says, and students do a lot of the work. The support organization he is a part of built an observation and interpretive area. Also at the event will be tables of artifacts from the site, pottery replicas, a game that was popular in the ancient culture and historical explanation of ownership over the mounds.
The University of Chicago purchased the mounds in the 1930s and conducted large excavations. Their first big find was discovering who made the mounds. This dig changed the way we think about pre-Columbian civilization in North America. At the time, people thought the mounds were too technically advanced for Native Americans to have built and that it had to be some lost race of people that came before, Schwegman says. But their civilization had collapsed because of the disease Cortez brought into Mexico and spread into North America, he adds, anywhere where there were dense populations, people died of smallpox and influenza.
Many famous archaeologists throughout the 20th century did their first dig at this site, he says, and a large volume of the dig was eventually published. Though large in scale, the excavations never found the sweat lodges where men would sit and 'sweat out the demons.' SIU found several of those in more recent years, and through carbon dating are able to identify more clearly the years of activity.
The mounds are located east of Brookport, Illinois, just north of the Ohio River. Get directions here.
