ST. LOUIS • One thousand years before there was serious talk of a new football stadium north of downtown, a thriving urban civilization built a network of earthen mounds on the same site. It was scraped away in the careless burst of a second city’s growth during the 19th century.
If any evidence survives of that prehistoric Mississippian culture, it’s buried beneath the bumpy streets, scattered businesses, weeded lots and vacant warehouses within the 90-acre site on the riverfront, north of Laclede’s Landing and east of Broadway. Maps and sketches from the early 1800s give locations for at least a dozen mounds within the stadium site, and roughly that many west and north of its fringes.