Curiosity bought me here, but something deeper, something more spiritual held me here. The long walk up the bluff left me in need of a brief rest, so I sat on the slope of one of the mounds. The entire Mississippi River valley lay before me. It was several miles wide at this point, but I could easily make out the bluffs to the east. Overhead a red tailed hawk wheeled across the sky.

I pressed my hands into the grass and felt the cool earth below; earth that held the bones, artifacts, and memory of an ancient people. The years peeled away and I found myself among those people, whose very survival was so dependant on the river valley that leaving it was almost unthinkable.

The warm summer sun shone brightly upon a small stand of cultivated crops. Here and there children, dressed in nothing more than a simple cloth, dug in the sand