The parking lots and strip malls that cover the outer zones of the city are also real.

They are, in their way, a monument too — to the specific historical choices that decided which histories would be preserved and which would be built over.

Understanding Cahokia is not about restoring a lost past.

It is about understanding the present more accurately — about recognizing that the flatlands of southwestern Illinois are not merely suburban real estate but the site of one of the greatest urban achievements in the history of this hemisphere, built by people whose story is still being told by their descendants, in the cultural practices and oral traditions and scholarly work of the Native nations whose heritage Cahokia represents.

The city is gone.