Hey, I'm Linnea Dominic, Curious City intern. As I mentioned last week, the Curious City team will be spending the next few months thinking of new formats for answering your questions. You'll hear some of them from time to time when we land on one we really like. But don't worry, we've got plenty for you to listen to in the meantime.

Lately, there's been a lot of debate in the news about representation.

And it might make you wonder, what was left out of the history you learned in school?

So we're curating episodes that add a little context, curious city style.

Last week, we ran a story about taking monuments down and putting them up.

This week, Jesse Dukes has a story of another kind of monument.

I recently learned Wisconsin has thousands of ancient earthworks built by Native Americans. They're called effigy mounds and are made from soil sculpted into three to six foot high shapes.

They're shaped like eagles, bears, and things that look like turtles or lizards.

They can be a hundred to a couple hundred feet long.

Wow.

Effigies are monument, and they're monumental construction.

This is Amy Rosebro, an archaeologist who specializes in effigy mounds.

She says the shapes and the landscape sometimes appear to tell a story.

They use the terrain in order to appear as if they're moving or if they're alive.

There's a great amount of artistic skill that goes into the final shaping of an effigy mound.

Artistic skill. Here's what she means. Native Americans made the mounds a thousand years ago,

and the shapes were consistent across hundreds of miles. They built them without surveying tools,

GPS, computers, or the bulldozers we would use today. And the builders could not see the

shapes they were building.

You need a bird's eye view for that.

Anyway, for a Chicagoan, the effigy mounds are something you'd associate with a place you'd visit.

More a Wisconsin or Iowa thing.

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