The Effigy Mounds

Along the bluffs over the Mississippi, people of the Woodland cultures built more than two hundred earthen mounds between about 750 and 1400 AD, and thirty-one of them are shaped like animals: bears and birds, one bear group marching 137 metres along the ridge. They are burial and ceremonial ground and remain sacred to twenty affiliated tribal nations. They read as nothing much from the ground and as unmistakable figures from the air, which is part of why so many were ploughed away before anyone protected them. PUBLIC national monument, stay on the trails.