I found the Cahokia mounds very interesting with respect to the grandeur of the city and the mounds themselves. It's hard to imagine such a large city forming with the limited technology the people of Cahokia had available to themselves. The vast distance they could trade over was also intriguing. They had shells from the golf coast and various commodities from all over America.
The mounds are a neat concept because rather than dig a hole and bury the dead in it, they raised the ground up to bury their dead. Thus, the ancestors buried couldn't be forgotten very easily since their grave was a land feature. To add to that the mounds took a long time to build perhaps decades for some of the larger ones which exemplifies the reverence they had for their ancestry. The concept of remembering ancestry is not as prevalent now a days, and I believe it is a lesson to be learned from the Mississippian people. If they could take the time to pay respect to their ancestors hundreds of years ago with the technologies we have now it shouldn't be hard at all to do so.
