The Monks Mound

This short little blog post will be about the Monks Mound, which is the largest mound at Cahokia (in southern Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville), is over 100 feet high and is about 955 feet long and 775 feet wide. Wow! At the base of this pile of earth, the Monks Mound is about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is the largest earthwork at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. One of the cool things about this mound, is the way it was formed. Unlike a lot of structures that require stone, this one was built by basket-transported clay and soil. It has been estimated that it took about 15 million baskets of earth to make the Monks Mound. Dang, talk about manual labor!

There have been many attempts at preservation, though, as the weather has taken a toll on this mound over the years, with slumping in certain areas, being one of the biggest problems. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia (with minor edits) that briefly talks about this: "The repairs of the 1980s and 1990s were only partly successful. In 2004 and 2005 more serious slumping episodes occurred. These occurrences showed that by adding new dirt to repair the major slump on the east side had been a mistake. After thinking it over, experts decided to try a new tactic. In 2007, backhoes were used to dig out the entire mass of earth from this slump and another at the northwest corner, to a level beyond the internal slippage zone."

Going by the image I provided above, it still seems like it's in decent shape to me. I mean, it's a gigantic mound of dirt. Why does it have to remain in absolute pristine condition? Anyway, I thought that this was pretty neat, and decided to share these tidbits with the community today. Oh, it looks like it would be good exercise, too, if you were to walk or run up and down the access ramp. Yeah, sort of like what Rocky would do... Ha-ha!

Semi-related Post: Are the Badlands really Bad?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Source = en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monks_Mound

---End of Post "The Monks Mound"