An artist's rendering depicts Cahokia's city center at its prime (Painting by L. K. Townsend/Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site)
An aerial view of Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in North America.
Posted on 09/27/2015 12:35:21 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
It was ten stories tall, and wider at the base than the Empire State Building. And nearly a thousand years ago, it was the centerpiece of the continent's largest city north of Mexico.
Today, the search to determine how native engineers built Monk's Mound -- North America's biggest prehistoric earthen structure -- has turned up some new and crucial, but very small, clues: the seeds and spores of ancient plants.
An aerial view of Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in North America.
Researchers studying the giant platform mound at the heart of the settlement of Cahokia have studied its internal structure in closer detail than ever. And their new findings suggest that the huge earthwork may have been built surprisingly quickly -- perhaps in just a fraction of the time that archaeologists once thought...
At its peak from about 1050 to 1100 CE, Cahokia was home to as many as 15,000 people, and Monks Mound was constructed as its symbolic center: a towering, rectangular series of terraces topped with a large public building, perhaps a temple.
Investigations into how the mound was built began in the 1960s, when researchers drilled nine core samples and, based on the layering that they found, surmised that it was constructed in 14 stages, over the course of as much as 250 years.
This seemed plausible enough at the time, considering that the mound was built entirely by hand...
But when the slopes of Monk's Mound began to collapse in 2005, Schilling and Dr. Neal Lopinot of Missouri State University, who led the new study, took advantage of the repairs being done to collect 22 samples from an exposed face of the mound's interior.
(Excerpt) Read more at westerndigs.org ...
An artist's rendering depicts Cahokia's city center at its prime (Painting by L. K. Townsend/Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site)
An aerial view of Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in North America.
When I was a little, really little girl. I lived in Cahokia. For the life of me I don’t remember seeing these mounds. But there was a fresh spring water fountain that my Mom used to take me to. It was delicious.
Don’t they know that it was Fred Flintstone’s dinosaur equipment company that built it?
Fascinating. I never knew about this. Might have to fly down there and check it out.
It’s obvious. They thought global warming was going to raise the ocean levels to a new high so they humped and slaved to built a safe haven.
There are still some small mounds in some state parks ( i.e. Perrot state park near Trempealeau, Wi). But near McGregor, Iowa is Effigy Mounds Nat. Monument where there are larger mounds.
Isn’t this where they found a pit with the skeletons of fifty three teen Indian girls who had been sacrificed?
Wasn’t life great back before Columbus!
I went to college in Cahokia.
In my teens, I worked for a farmer in the town of Ashford, WI (Fond du Lac County). He explained how he had been approached by a tribe who’s mounds had been built on the land his farm enveloped. As they explained what they were looking for, he began to remember/recognize land features that they were describing (from his childhood exploring on the family farm), and was able to take them directly to the these land features. There were several mounds, in formation, spread out over 300 acres. The mounds had been somewhat preserved because the mounds would have been difficult to cultivate, and were surrounded by stands of large trees. There was a network of trails that the farmer had thought were deer trails, but were also a part of the mound structures.
I have to go visit him and his wife again!
Same story in prime Iowa farmland areas.
Obvious mounds and human-related features not easily noticeable unless someone points them out. Then they are obvious. Sometimes mounds are assumed to be glacial moraine features.
I don’t comment a lot on your wonderful threads, but I read them and am appreciative of the pings!
I’ve only been to the Moundsville, WV museum once, and I have always wanted to go back and learn more about it...it’s the second largest (next to Cahokia...
http://moundville.ua.edu/moundville/
They were sod busters:
Parts of it appear to have been built from whole blocks of sod, rather than basketfuls of soil.
“They are cut sodblocks turned upside down and stacked like bricks,” Lopinot said.
Schilling added, “This is the first time sodblock construction, or repair, has been identified in the mound.”
Amazing what you can accomplish when there's no EPA.
Probably why Columbus came.
Nice!
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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having been born and raised in Iowa, don’t recall seeing those..
Indian burial mounds??
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