Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?

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In 1811, a young lawyer and journalist named Henry Brackenridge found the ruins of an ancient city near St. Louis.

At the time, St. Louis was a small, young city that served as the gateway to the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Americans knew little about the new territory, and Brackenridge was struck by the size of the ruins. "If the city of Philadelphia and its environs were deserted," he wrote, "there would not be more numerous traces of human existence."

As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat has written, Brackenridge was standing on the site of what was once the Grand Plaza of Cahokia, a city inhabited in 1250 by some ten to twenty thousand Native Americans. Brackenridge believed he'd made a great discovery. He did not see ancient stone walls or worn foundations. Instead he marveled at the pattern of raised earth that resembled an urban grid, human bones, and mounds of soil formed into dozens of grassy pyramids up to 100 feet tall.

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