The East St. Louis Mound Complex: A Historical Overview

The East St. Louis Mound Complex (ESTLMC) is an archaeological oddity. Although commonplace in many parts of the world, the ESTLMC is the only instance in American cultural history in which a modern city overprinted, but did not com-pletely destroy, an ancient one. Furthermore, the ESTLMC is currently the most intensively studied Mississippian mound center, with an enormous database of features and artifacts largely generated by IDOT's MRB Project (2008-2012), yet the whole of the site remains poorly understood due to its burial under historic fill and urban development. This paper provides a broad overview of the ESTMC's discovery, its partial destruction and burial in the nineteenth century, its subsequent rediscovery in the twentieth century, and a history of IDOT's 1-55/70 and MRB investigations. It concludes with a review of some major puzzles that remain to be solved.