These studies will complicate and enrich the current interpretations in ways that are difficult to predict but that will almost certainly reveal things that current interpretations do not capture.

The engagement of Native nations in the archaeological investigation and interpretation of Cahokia will, as it continues and deepens, produce interpretive frameworks that draw on Indigenous knowledge traditions in ways that purely archaeological analysis cannot.

The questions that Native scholars and community members bring to the site — questions about what the mounds meant, what the ceremonies that took place in the Grand Plaza were celebrating, what the symbolic system of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex expressed — are questions that the archaeological record can only partially answer.

The living traditions that carry forward elements of the Mississippian heritage can contribute dimensions of understanding that excavation alone cannot provide.