Deb Aronson

Magnificent Obsession

First appeared in in December 2001 under Profiles

It is 9:30 a.m. when archaeologist John Kelly’s pine-green Jeep Cherokee lumbers across the grassy field and comes to a stop at two tarp-covered trenches blocked by barricades and yellow tape. It’s quiet except for the whirring and buzzing of crickets and the distant, dull whine of traffic from Highway 70 nearby. Kelly, 56 years old, tall and lanky, with a narrow face and high forehead, eases himself from the car, cup of coffee in hand. He is at Cahokia Mounds in Collinsville, Illinois, site of the largest prehistoric Native American city that ever existed.

Kelly, who has bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in archaeology, has spent his entire 30-year career at Cahokia Mounds. If there was ever a site that warranted the dedication of a lifetime or two, Cahokia Mounds is it.

Cahokia Mounds is on the flood plain of the Mississippi River, where the terrain is flatter than a farm pond on a still day — except for the mounds. The mounds range from barely a ripple to Monks Mound, which soars majestically 100 feet above the land and is 500 meters square at the base — larger than the pyramids of Egypt. Leading members of that lost North American society lived on mounds and conducted religious ceremonies there. Other mounds were used for burials. In its heyday — 1000 A.D. — Cahokia Mounds covered almost six square miles and was home to 20,000 people.

To Kelly, untangling the history of Cahokian culture is as exciting as decoding the human genome … and, to most people, just as arcane. Perhaps there is some basic principle equivalent to DNA that sheds light on how all humankind is organized. Or perhaps not, but the trick is finding evidence in the archaeological record. What model best approximates Cahokia’s organization? A monarchy, commune, democracy? Did it mirror the Vatican or the White House? Archaeologists, in the absence of incontrovertible proof, delight in arguing over such questions.

Kelly works 12-hour days, seven days a week. He gets paid for 30 of those hours: he holds a half-time position at Washington University and a quarter-time position with the National Park Service. This suits Kelly just fine. The rest of what he does, his own personal salvage work as mounds become threatened by development, he thinks of as his hobby.

Kelly is often dirty: his car is dusty; his office his dusty; his clothes, decent but not fancy, shirts with collars, pants (not jeans) with belts, and Maine hunting shoes, are dusty. Kelly literally breathes Cahokia Mounds. It is, for him, more than a career. It is a way of life.

Not that he’s obsessed about it. Passionate, yes; committed, yes; but obsessed…no…. obsessed is where ego steps in and takes over, where one is struggling not for pure knowledge but for fame and prestige, even money. “There is a fine line between being passionate and obsessive,” Kelly says. “I think I’m walking it … I like to think I’m more passionate than obsessed, but to some degree it’s a little bit of an obsession for me.”

Kelly, who has been editing a paper (for an upcoming meeting) at his computer since 7 a.m., is now ready to start this next phase of his workday. He will spend nine hours here. The sun is bright, the day is clear and hot, but Kelly is worried about the weather. Rain is forecast for two days from now and he needs to finish his work in the man-high trenches before they are inundated. As usual, everything at the site is covered in dust — the tarps, the trowels, the folding rules, and 50-meter tapes, even Kelly’s camera. Kelly removes the green-black tarp and as it billows free, the trench smells dank and musty, but in an instant the smell is gone, snatched away by the stiff breeze.

Aztecs, Egyptians, these ancient builders and their creations are firmly ensconced in our communal knowledge. But Cahokia Mounds, scattered here and there, overgrown and sometimes covered by asphalt, grass or buildings, does not share that exalted position. Yet mounds are as American as pyramids are Egyptian. Mounds, remnants of vibrant communities, sprinkle the American landscape from Florida to Mississippi, from Louisiana to Wisconsin. Cahokia stands out as the largest and most complex community. It was the first American city.

“Some people collect arrowheads,” says Kelly. “I collect communities.”

The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, first established by the state of Illinois in 1925, encompasses 2,200 acres and 68 mounds — about 80 percent of the entire Cahokia settlement. It attracts about 300,000 visitors a year. In recognition of its importance in the history of humankind, Cahokia has been designated a World Heritage site, a distinction it shares with the Great Wall of China and India’s Taj Mahal.

Many other mounds, not part of Cahokia proper, spread into the broken-down streets of East St. Louis, eastward to the bluffs and working class homes of Collinsville; beyond the highways that crisscross the area; even beyond the mighty Mississippi into St. Louis, although those mounds have long since been destroyed as the city expanded. Only St. Louis’ nickname — “Mound City”— remains.

Today, Kelly, hatless, watchless, canteenless, and squinting against the sun, takes his graph paper, mechanical pencil and tool box and climbs stiffly into the trench. His goal today is to draw a map of the “soil profile,” which involves intricately recording and labeling layers of soil — all slightly different shades of brown. Once mapped and otherwise documented the trenches can be backfilled.

The trenches (test units 5 and 9 in archaeologists’ argot) are cut into Mound 34. Like the rest of the field, it is covered knee deep in hops vine that can grab and trip an unwary visitor, overgrown grass, and wildflowers. Mound 34 is dwarfed by Monks Mound, which sits a few hundred yards away. But unassuming Mound 34 may be Kelly’s key to poking holes in the establishment theory that Cahokia was reaching its end around 1250. Shells found in the mound and engraved in a style thought to have originated much later and in the Southeast suggests that Cahokia continued —smaller but still vibrant — for several centuries. To prove this theory, an accurate timeline is essential. Hence Kelly’s focus on the soil profile.

“You can get caught up in the details, but it’s the details that really tell the story,” says Kelly.

John Kelly has brought an intensity to his pursuit of knowledge that has enabled, or maybe forced, him to work outside the academic establishment. He likes teaching but he isn’t interested in spending time on committees, in faculty meetings, and on other administrative tasks required by full-time professors. He has struggled to be recognized in academic circles, but he prefers to be right where he is — outside the circle.

“There are certain steps you have to go through in order to get recognition,” says Kelly, who has applied, albeit half-heartedly, for academic positions. “I was never that concerned about that aspect of it. I don’t like bureaucracy, I never wanted to be a manager. I’m the type of person who likes to sit out there getting dirty and learning.”

Young Kelly, oldest of four boys, loved collecting rocks and arrowheads. He neatly catalogued and labeled them. Oddly enough, he hated getting dirty. His father was in the Air Force and the family moved often. “I don’t know how many places we lived — California, Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Germany, Virginia, all before I went to college.”

When they lived in Germany, Kelly loved to sightsee. “He especially liked looking at old things,” says Kelly’s mother, Marguerite Kelly.

As a boy, Kelly was always reading. “Name any Native American chief, there wasn’t one of them I hadn’t read a biography about — Tecumsah, Pontiac — I was interested in them as individuals. No offense to Cricket (Kelly’s wife) or anything, but I always thought I’d marry an Indian. I stood up and cheered in the Battle of the Little Big Horn when the Pawnees beat Custer.”

Down in test unit 5, which Kelly usually shares with several types of crickets, big black ones and little transparent ones, he discovers a snake … small, to be sure, but a snake nonetheless. Kelly tries to convince the snake to leave by gently herding it into a corner and picking it up with a handy yardstick, but it writhes away.

“Probably just a hognose, but they try to make themselves look like copperheads,” says Kelly. The snake takes refuge in a corner and Kelly, opting for a wary truce, turns his attention to the dig. First, he outlines different layers of soil revealed in the wall using the sharp edge of his trowel. On the floor of the trench he points to two five-inch wide lines intersecting to form a corner. This tells Kelly a building, now long gone, was here. Kelly then points out where the Cahokians had cleared the site, leveling the area before piling other, darker earth in an even layer. He talks about the legend of the Earth Diver; Native American cosmology describes an otter diving beneath the water and bringing up the first land upon which man appeared. Perhaps this is a re-enactment of that creation myth. “I’d be fascinated to know where the dark mud deposit is coming from,” Kelly says.

After this tour of the trench, Kelly gets to work. Soil map on his right clipped to a wooden board, pencil in hand, he settles himself on to an overturned dry wall bucket. Buckets are the Swiss Army knife of any archaeological project. Right side up, buckets hold trowels and other equipment. Filled with dirt, they hold down tarps. Upside down, they work as stools, sawhorse-like supports for screens, and a step stool to get out of the trench. As he works, the sun turns Kelly’s face pinker around the edges and makes sweat bead his brow. Still not a cloud in the sky.

From first through sixth grade, Kelly’s family lived in Montgomery, Alabama. He went to Lake Jordan and found arrowheads. Kelly visited an uncle in South Carolina who introduced him to collecting. At the end of second grade, Kelly went to YMCA camp. He went to a mound with the camp and spent the day learning about arrowheads. By high school Kelly had decided to pursue archaeology. After graduating, he went to Beloit College in Wisconsin, one of the top places to study North American archaeology.

“We never tried to talk him out of it,” says Kelly’s mother of his interest in archaeology. “One thing my husband always said was, ‘If this is what the children want to do, let them do it.”

Talking of his college days spent living with the fraternity boys of Sigma Chi, Kelly’s face lights up. “I like to think of it as a good way to understand the anthropology of secret societies” he says, with a sly smile. In college, Kelly came under the tutelage of archaeologist Bob Salzer, organized the college museum’s collection of stone tools, and met and began dating Cricket, who also became an archaeologist. Today she is an expert in zooarchaeology, the study of animal remains found at archaeological sites. They have been married 32 years and have three grown children, one of whom is in graduate school in archaeology.

This morning in the field, Kelly moves on to the second trench, where he wants to photograph the soil profiles. Preparing the profile for its picture is a methodical and meticulous process. Kelly uses his trowel to sweep the wall clean of trowel marks. He goes systematically over every spot, sometimes doubling back to redo a section. When he is done, Kelly sweeps up all the fallen soil, dumps it in a bucket, clambers out of the trench and sifts the dirt through a screen bottom that sits on two overturned buckets. He’s looking for tiny artifacts. Today he finds a single fish bone, which he bags, labels and puts in a film canister. Then he climbs back down into the trench, mists the wall with a hand-pumped water jug, studies the wall and repeats the process. After the third time, he snaps his photographs. This entire procedure takes an hour.

Kelly first came to Cahokia as an undergraduate. Salzer sent both him and Cricket to supervise the Beloit College Cahokia Field School, which they did for three summers. Kelly’s work formed the core of his 1980 University of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation. Trying to understand the complexity of the site, how the community was organized and what that organization meant, intrigued Kelly.

In the early 1970s, Kelly was the field director for the archaeological survey for a section of Interstate 255 near the small town of Dupo and about 10 miles south of Cahokia. A major part of this project involved excavating the so-called Range site, which predates Cahokia proper. One of the mysteries of Cahokia is that it seemed to arrive on the scene suddenly and yet fully formed. Within 50 years it went from uninhabited to a full-fledged city with as many as 20,000 inhabitants. Where did these people come from? Range is one possible place.

At Range, buildings were occupied just five or ten years and then abandoned and new ones were built. Each time, they were built in a semicircular pattern surrounding a central plaza that held a post, four pits, or both. At its peak, the community contained more than 100 structures. Kelly and his team worked 15-hour days for three years to excavate the site. It took another eight years to analyze the data and write the final report.

“Everything was changing all the time at Range and it wasn’t caused by environmental pressures,” says Kelly. “Range seems key to understanding early Cahokia. It’s a really good candidate for a “pre-city” organization.” Kelly shows rare frustration over the lack of attention his report generated. “No one criticized it, but no one paid much attention to it either. What are you going to do? I hate to repeat myself over and over.” He frowns. It’s almost a scowl.

But Kelly’s work has not gone unnoticed in the rarefied world of archaeology. He is widely considered an expert on Mississippian culture in general and on Cahokia in particular. When his colleagues talk about Kelly they mention his deep commitment to the area, that he has settled nearby in order to keep an eye on the mounds, that he has worked to save the mounds outside the state historical site from destruction, that he knows the archaeological history of the area better than anyone. “John is a world of knowledge,” says Bill Iseminger, archaeologist and site supervisor at Cahokia Mounds. “He’s an excellent source if you want to know who dug where and when.”

In 1988, Kelly was hired to direct excavations related to the widening of Interstate 55/70. He discovered the remains of a mound group in East St. Louis that everyone thought had been destroyed. Ever since then, Kelly has dedicated himself to saving other mounds, particularly in East St. Louis.

“Sites were being destroyed,” he says. “I had to be here to deal with it.”

Frequently, while driving in his community, Kelly will see a construction project starting that threatens a mound. He will pull as many volunteers together as he can to quickly salvage the site. At least one site Kelly tried to save in the 1980s was as large as the Range site, but only a fraction could be salvaged before construction began.

It sickened Kelly to see mounds being destroyed before he could even salvage them, so he tried to protect them. He figured out that if he watched the delinquent property tax sales, he could buy properties with mounds on them at a fraction of their value. Kelly bought the first property in 1997. “That was a huge turning point for me,” he says. Kelly, in his quixotic moments, imagines a greenway of these mounds, safely preserved from development and tying the working class and poor communities of the area together. Not so quixoticly, he has purchased four parcels so far.

The Kelly’s have paid a price for John’s magnificent obsession. Family vacations were always by car and to visit relatives, where room and board were free. They would drive all night to save the cost of a hotel. Camping would have been a good family activity, but they didn’t have the money for the needed equipment. After renting houses for 19 years, John and Cricket dipped into John’s retirement fund and put a down payment on a 50-year-old, three-bedroom house in Columbia, Illinois, population 7,500. They put all three children through college — thanks to help from grandparents and loans. Until recently, Kelly drove a 1986 Escort with 210,000 miles on it. His “new” car, the used Cherokee, had almost 100,000 miles on it when he bought it.

“We have struggled financially,” says Cricket. “I don’t know if we’re even middle class.”

These days, Kelly is starting to think about retiring from Cahokia.

“I’m starting to think of how to wean myself from it,” he says. Based on all the material he has collected from various contract and salvage projects and still has to analyze, Kelly figures it will take 15-20 years to clean and organize everything he’s got. “That will take some kind of perseverance,” he says.

It is 5:20 p.m. and Kelly shows no signs of packing it in for the day. Instead he moves on to the next wall. Again he scrapes methodically in short rhythmic strokes, sweeps the scrapings, screens the dirt, clambers down again, sprays the wall, inspects his handiwork, repeats the process. At 6 p.m. he is ready to photograph. By 6:15, the shadows are getting long and the sun sits right atop Monks Mound as Kelly covers the trenches again. He runs the metal beams in a tic-tac-toe pattern, spreads three tarps over the beams and finally weights these down with a mishmash of rocks, cinderblocks and dirt-filled buckets. By 6:25, the sun is behind Monks Mound, both trenches are covered and bright yellow tape is again strung. It is now dusk and Kelly climbs in his Cherokee and drives away… until tomorrow. The dig looks exactly as it did nine hours ago.

It is now dusk and Kelly climbs in his Cherokee and drives away… until tomorrow. Two days later, just as predicted, the land is deluged in rain. But by then, Kelly is done, at least with this small part of the enormous Cahokia puzzle.