Once we would have looked to the natural ecology of place for meaning, and subsequently to systems of land division and settlement, it is in the landscape typology of the mound that the American Bottom most clearly enters the field of legibility. This region is celebrated quite rightly as the center of a vast civilization that had as its central architectural and urban expression the construction of mounds. Mound complexes from the well-known Cahokia Mounds to the lesser-known Pulcher and Grassy Lake sites remain the defining signifiers of a long and advanced era of North American settlement.

Yet the construction of mounds continues. Mound building if anything has even increased. While the civic and cosmic ordering that apparently animated so many of the Mississippian-era mound builders in this new era of mound building has been sidelined for the logistical and the proximate, our contemporary mounds index a way of being no less profoundly than the artifacts of the mound builders of prehistory. Slag heap, salt dome, aggregate piles, landfill, mulch mound—these are the forms of our cosmologies.

Which is to say, in landscape, it all matters. It all has meaning.

This is an itinerary of the Significant and Insignificant Mounds of the American Bottom.

It is oriented toward an intentional flattening of signification—where meaning mingles uneasily with form. It puts us in proximity to meaning, without being identical to it. The value judgments suggested in our title do not cut along easy lines. For, in the end, each of these mounds is, on its own terms, both significant and insignificant. They are all markers to a way of being, a way of seeing the world. Our interest in the pairing of text and image, and in the pairing of so-called meaning-filled and meaning-less subjects, is to bring the process of signification itself to the surface, in order to complicate the received value judgments that so often attend landscape photography and description.

The American Bottom is a particularly prolix landscape—with an archive of written description that stands in marked contrast to its relatively unknown status today. From the early notebooks of French Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet and those of the French American Jesuit missionary Father Marquette, to the French Jesuit monks who set up parishes in the region, through the Early Republic notebooks of both William and George Rogers Clark, and going forward, throughout the nineteenth-century expeditions—this is a landscape that has been cast within the net of language for centuries. Yet we are also keenly aware that it is only since European settlement that this landscape has been made to “speak.” And it is here where our photographs put forward an argument for artifacts as evidence—artifacts that index a way of being and which carry meaning and value across discursive registers. Indeed, it is through a measured approach of adesignation—the intentional misalignment of image and referent—that Significant and Insignificant Mounds frames an irreducible landscape form—subject to neither appropriative reverence nor declinist narratives.

Among the many voices coaxing this irreducible landscape into the order of language, we might look to Edmund Flagg for one of the earliest and most comprehensive descriptions. Writing from the edge of Monk’s Mound in 1837, Flagg gives voice to the mingling of cultural and natural landscapes that define the American Bottom:

The view from the southern extremity of the mound, which is free from trees and underbrush, is extremely beautiful. Away to the south sweeps off the broad river-bottom, at this place about seven miles in width, its waving surface variegated by all the magnificent hues of the summer flora of the prairies. At intervals, from the deep herbage is flung back the flashing sheen of a silvery lake to the oblique sunlight; while dense groves of the crab-apple and other indigenous wild fruits are sprinkled about like islets in the verdant sea. To the left, at a distance of three or four miles, stretches away the long line of bluffs, now presenting a surface marked and rounded by groups of mounds, and now wooded to their summits, while a glimpse at times may be caught of the humble farmhouses at their base. On the right meanders the Cantine Creek, which fives the name to the group of mounds, betraying at intervals its bright surface through the belt of forest by which it is margined. In this direction, far away in blue distance, rising through the mist and forest, may be caught a glimpse of the spires and cupolas of the city, glancing gayly in the rich summer sun. The base of the mound is circled upon every side by lesser elevations of every form and at various distances. Of these, some lie in the heart of the extensive maize-fields, which constitute the farm of the proprietor of the principal mound, presenting a beautiful exhibition of light and shade, shrouded as they are in the dark, twinkling leaves. The most remarkable are two standing directly opposite the southern extremity of the principal one, at a distance some hundred yards, in close proximity to each other and which never fail to arrest the eye. There are also several large square mounds covered with forests along the margin of the creek to the right, and groups are caught rising from the declivities of the distant bluffs.11Edmund Flagg, The Far West, Or, A Tour Beyond the Mountains: Embracing Outlines of Western Life and Scenery; Sketches of the Prairies Rivers, Ancient Mounds, Early Settlements of the French, Etc., Volume 1. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838, pp. 166–67.

Today, standing atop the visitor-worn surface of Monk’s Mound, we might be more likely to take note of the hulking mass of Milam Landfill directly to the west, or the brown smoke-filled horizon of US Steel to the north, or, until very recently, the twin stacks of the former Armour Plant of National City. Look hard enough, and we might be able to retrain our eye to see the meander scars and lowland forests that still define the creek margins of Flagg’s description. Even though those creeks no longer flow, and canals and ditches over the past century have channelized them, the floodplain of the American Bottom retains traces of its lacustrine past. Similarly, the array of mounds, now sharply delimited by the lawn-mowing regime of the State Park maintenance staff, remind us that, despite the destruction of a large number of mounds in the period of industrial and infrastructural growth, markers to prior inhabitation remain numerous.

Yet the provenance of precontact mounds has not always been so unambiguous. Up until the early twentieth century, it was common enough to find in scholarly reviews and articles suggestions and arguments as to the natural origins of the mounds. It was as if the ideological barriers to accepting the creative and constructive capacity of pre-contact Native Americans was too great an intellectual burden for anthropologists to bear. As only one example, we might cite the paper given in Philadelphia at the 1914 Geological Society of America meeting by Dr. A. R. Crook, titled “Origin of Monks Mound,” in which he writes: “It may be well to inquire if all so-called mounds in the Mississippi Valley are not natural topographic forms.”22A. R. Crook, “Origin of Monk’s Mound,” paper delivered at the Geological Society of America, Philadelphia, 1914. And where, eight years later, he recapitulates—in no less an authority than the celebrated journal Science—the position that a recent study “establishes, beyond doubt, that [Monk’s Mound] is not of artificial origin, as has been so generally held but that it is a remnant remaining after the erosion of the alluvial deposits, which at one time filled the valley of the Mississippi, in the locality known as the ‘Great American Bottoms.’”33A. R. Crook, “Cahokia or Monks Mound Not of Artificial Origin,” Discussion and Correspondence, Science, vol. 40, no. 1026 (1922), p. 312. Windblown piles of loess; aggregated sediment from eddying currents of the river; or simply the remainder of even larger mounds eroded by the regular flooding of the Mississippi—the theories of the mounds’ origins seem to more easily imagine a natural world full of creative agency than a native peoples’ summoning of order and meaning.

Alternatively, alongside this topographic framing, a parallel narrative emerged further divesting the agency of contemporaneous Native American predecessors—the Mound-builder myth. In 1788, one no less influential than Noah Webster described the Ohio River Mounds as the work of “Carthaginians or other Mediterranean nations.” With this, archaeologist John Kelly writes how “the beginnings of the ‘Mound-builder’ myth were carefully being sown in the fertile minds of the American Public.”44John E. Kelly, “The Grassy Lake Site: An Historical and Archeological Overview,” in Steve R. Ahler (ed.), Mounds, Modoc, and Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Melvin L. Fowler. Illinois: Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers, vol. 28, pp. 469–510. This broader attitude can perhaps be understood as a symptom of the so-called Theory of Two Civilizations—the theory that, prior to exploration and inhabitation by Europeans in historic time, there must have been two distinct epochs of human habitation of the Continent. The inability of a European-settler consciousness to imagine and accept the mounds as a product of the indigenous peoples or their immediate forbears led not a few to posit an “Extinct Race”55Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Classics of Anthropology, 1848/1988. of people who inhabited the territory and left these material traces of their civilization. For others, however, the mounds display little more than an innate animal consciousness. Lucien Carr, for example, was a significant figure in turn-of-the-century archaeology and assistant curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology. He somewhat apologetically writes, “as a matter of fact, the ant hills of Africa, in point of relative size, and in the architectural knowledge and engineering skill displayed in their construction, are quite equal to any earth-work in the Ohio Valley.”66Lucien Carr, The Mounds of the Mississippi Valley, Historically Considered. Frankfort, KY: Yeoman Press, 1883.

Where, then, is the threshold for mound-ness to be found? As an early geologist of the Mound groups of the American Bottom noted in 1922: “Practically all of the mounds which are large enough to attract attention have a distinct artificiality in their regularity of form and steepness of slope.”77Morris M. Leighton, “The Cahokia Mounds: Part II: Some Geological Aspects,” University of Illinois Bulletin, October 28, 1923. Which is to say, in the eye’s catalog of forms, it is a particular angle of repose, a ratio of figuration, which enters a mound into the field of the remarkable. However, when compared to the complexes that enliven a kind of global pyramid consciousness, what distinguish the Cahokian Mound group are its blunt, earthen edges. Rather than the sharp stonework of the Temple of the Sun and Moon, Monk’s Mound is constructed entirely of dirt and is currently covered in a wooly sheet of grass and weeds. The mounds surrounding the main ceremonial center likewise are carpeted in turf and most distinctly enter the field of legibility immediately following their biweekly lawn mowing. It is in this bright line of demarcation, in the contour and mowing decision of the maintenance crew, that Cahokia reaches its architectural apotheosis.

What do we gain by following the piles, by attending to this base ordering of matter? It is my belief that there is a counter historiography that could be written, which traces the mound as the originary architectural gesture. A mark with meaning. An alternate tectonic myth grounded in the recognition of earth out-of-place. Adolph Loos, in recognizing the unadorned, psychological power of the mound, writes:

“When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six foot long and three foot wide, heaped up in a rough pyramid shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. That is architecture.”88Adolph Loos, “Architecture,” Der Andere, 1909, quoted from Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972.

Architecture as a recognition of matter out-of-place; of matter in particular arrangement; of an affective register of arrangement

Although, as for every pile there is a pit, we would do well not to let the formal legibility of the mound distract us from the fundamental transactional economy in this (dis)ordering of matter. Lewis Mumford, that scion of urban meta-narratives, reminds us that the quarry pit is characteristic of the process of Abbau, or un-building: “What is taken out of the quarry or pithead cannot be replaced.”99Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace International, 1968. And so, with the borrow pits that form a ring around Cahokia Mounds State Park, the regular, rectangular water bodies that lie adjacent to highway construction, and the hundreds of mines and quarries that lie out of eyeshot, we must be attentive to the reordering of earth that gives us all of our mounds. In this, we can read the mound as a transitional object. As the becoming-city. For it is in the hundreds of unremarked piles of limestone, earth, mulch, and sand, and their parallel constellation of pits, that our roads, buildings, sidewalks, and parks are aggregated and extracted.

But perhaps our mounds are no less enigmatic. After all, who, really, can account for the otherworldly, colorful mound sitting across the river just south of the Gateway Arch? That reliable sources tell me it is a heap of residue left over after the cleaning of coal does not explain the range of reds, browns, blues, and yellows that marble its surface—let alone begin to answer what it is doing in the floodable part of the floodplain. I have revisited this mound dozens of times, and each visit reveals a new silhouette, a new stratum, a new rent carved by the most recent rain or flood.

I know all the constituent parts of this mound—the Fe, the C, the O, the N, the Pb—but I will never understand this mound.

It eludes me in its significance.