The Winter Lecture Series is an annual winter event at Cahokia Mounds.  One lecture is held per month in January, February, and March.   These are generally one hour presentations on topics related to archaeology or Cahokia Mounds, followed by a brief Q&A period.  The lectures are free and are held in the Interpretive Center auditorium at 2 pm.   This series is brought to you by the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society.

The first lecture will be held on January 28 when Mark Wagner, PhD presents his lecture titled, “Bound to the Western Waters:  Searching for Lewis and Clark at Ft. Kaskaskia, Illinois.”  Fort Kaskaskia is a 1750s French state historic site in Randolph County, Illinois,  that has long been believed to have been the site of a later American fort of the same name from which Lewis and Clark recruited 12 soldiers for their expedition to explore the American west in 1803.  SIU Carbondale archaeological field school investigations at Ft. Kaskaskia in 2017 revealed that it indeed is a 1750s French fort but found no evidence that it had ever been visited by Lewis and Clark.  Instead, we discovered the remains of the American Ft. Kaskaskia (1802-1807) on a separate hill top 300 m to the north.  In this talk, Wagner discusses the history and archaeology of the two forts and plans for additional field school investigations at both sites in 2018.

Mark Wagner is the Director of the Center for Archaeological Investigations (CAI) and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.   His research interests include late eighteenth to early nineteenth century Native American and colonial period archaeology as well as the prehistoric Native American rock art of Illinois.