Heartlands Conservancy and the Mounds Initiative

 

The Heartlands Conservancy logo

The Heartlands Conservancy logo

The Heartlands Conservancy made a brief presentation about the Mounds Initiative on Wednesday night, January 28, 2015 at the SCHS quarterly general meeting. The two Heartlands Conservancy representatives were Galen Gritts of the the conservancy’s Strategic Advisory Committee and Suzanne Kutterer-Sieburt, Independent Consultant Mounds Initiative and archaeologist. Galen Gritts gave a brief introduction to the Mounds initiative, and then the two representatives manned an information booth to display materials, answer questions and to ask SCHS members for support for the initiative in the form of a letter for the HeartLands Conservancy’s The Mounds – America’s First Cities:  A Feasibility Study.

View the letter of support at bottom of this page. Download the letter to your computer with a save command.

The initiative seeks to raise the visibility of Cahokia Mounds by gaining some sort of status within the National Park Service. The resulting higher status would bring additional visitors and funding to the Mounds. The initiative also seeks to bring in the satellite sites in the region that were part of the Mississippian culture that created Cahokia Mounds. The other sites may in the future be connected to Cahokia Mounds by trails.

The following links provide additional information about the efforts of the Heartlands Conservancy.  The Heartlands Conservancy web site.
Features about the mounds initiative were aired on or featured in the following news outlets:
•  St Louis on the Air – March 11, 2014
•  KMOX – March 9, 2014
 BND.com
•  Illinois Business Journal See the Facebook page for the Heartlands Conservancy

Rising 100 feet above the ground, Monks Mound is the tallest of the 80 or so mounds remaining at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois. Around 900 years ago, it was a carefully maintained earthen pyramid, supporting a large wooden temple. Véronique LaCapra / St. Louis Public Radio From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

Rising 100 feet above the ground, Monks Mound is the tallest of the 80 or so mounds remaining at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois. Around 900 years ago, it was a carefully maintained earthen pyramid, supporting a large wooden temple.
Véronique LaCapra / St. Louis Public Radio From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

A closer look at a section of a map of current and destroyed Mississippian mounds in the St. Louis region. Heartlands Conservancy From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

A closer look at a section of a map of current and destroyed Mississippian mounds in the St. Louis region.
Heartlands Conservancy
From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

 

Map of current and destroyed Mississippian mounds in the St. Louis region. From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

Map of current and destroyed Mississippian mounds in the St. Louis region.
From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

Key to map of current and destroyed Mississippian mounds in the St. Louis region. From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

Key to map of current and destroyed Mississippian mounds in the St. Louis region.
From: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/efforts-underway-enhance-national-designation-cahokia-mounds

 

View the letter of support below with the option to download it to your computer with a save command. [spiderpowa-pdf src=”http://www.schs.ws/schs2/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/HeartLands-Conservancy-letter-of-support.pdf”]