Note: this topic is from . Thanks BenLurkin.
Posted on 08/19/2016 11:42:09 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Located in southern Illinois, eight miles from present-day St Louis, it was probably the largest North American city north of Mexico at that time. It had been built by the Mississippians, a group of Native Americans who occupied much of the present-day south-eastern United States, from the Mississippi river to the shores of the Atlantic.
Cahokia was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city for its time. Yet its history is virtually unknown by most Americans and present-day Illinoisans.
...
Its mix of people made Cahokia like an early-day Manhattan, drawing residents from throughout the Mississippian-controlled region: the Natchez, the Pensacola, the Choctaw, the Ofo. Archaeologists conducting strontium tests on the teeth of buried remains have found a third of the population was “not from Cahokia, but somewhere else”, according to Emerson, who is director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. “And that’s throughout the entire sequence [of Cahokia’s existence.]”
The Native Americans at Cahokia farmed, traded and hunted. They were also early urban planners, who used astronomical alignments to lay out a low-scale metropolis of 10-20,000 people, featuring a town centre with broad public plazas and key buildings set atop vast, hand-built earthen mounds. The largest of these mounds was 100 feet tall and covered 14 acres – and still exists today.
But rather than developing, like London, into a modern metropolis, Cahokia is more like the fabled lost continent of Atlantis. Having become a major population centre around AD1050, by 1350 it was largely abandoned by its people – and no one is sure why. Neither war, disease, nor European conquest drove Cahokia’s residents from their homes. Indeed, the first white man to reach these lands, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, didn’t do so until 1540.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Flooding Mississippi river, earthquakes, lots of diseases like hanta virus that would sweep the continent after severe droughts. When the Maya civilization collapsed due to extreme drought it took its feeder lines with it including the people at cahokoia- all the way to Lumpkin County Georgia that has proven remains of mayan type settlement construction in the Gold Fields that got the Cherokee evited by A. Jackson. Long sentence.
No, some of those Vikings in Kensington, Minn., sailed down the Mississippi to Cahokia to loot and pillage the place.
The “great die-off” was due to smallpox (and probably some other diseases that the natives had no resistance to). The Spanish brought their bugs with them to Mexico and South America, and within a few years, the diseases spread all throughout North America too.
Excellent use of current memes, lacking only a referral to delayed adulthood.
On another subject, anybody know what has happened to 'SunkenCiv' (sp?). He seems to have gone silent.
“It’s interesting,” he adds. “At Cahokia the danger is from the people on top; not other people [from other tribes or locations] attacking you.”
Yes...interesting...
we know that the vikings got as far as newfoundland. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say that they brought diseases with them that caused die offs.
Do you have references or are you just correlating the dates.
Mere conjecture on my part based on the timeline, but here’s a good discussion on the subject:
http://www.strangehistory.net/2014/03/17/didnt-vikings-bring-disease-americas/
” ... If the land plays out or you get a bad harvest, you have go further afield - which is iffy when your transport is animal based. ...”
The search for food, and its transport to their city, would have been iffier still for the Mississippian culture. They kept no domestic draught animals larger than dogs. No one did in North America, until the Spanish left horses behind, who survived and bred. So everything the Cahokian urbanites may have found had to be carried home on people’s backs, or dogs’ backs, or dragged.
And the farther they had to go afield, the more likely they’d be to encounter groups less inclined to bow to their self-appointed status as religious and secular overlords. Possibly, forage expeditions got wiped out, or robbed of their spoils on the trudge home.
Llamas - the only domestic animals anywhere in the western hemisphere with size, strength and abilities greater than a dog, were confined to South America at that time.
And no one in the Western Hemisphere had wheels.
Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been a central feature of plenty of urbanized “Native American” societies beyond the Aztecs: Maya, Inca, Moche at least.
they knew chicago would suk?
‘Ritual Human Sacrifice” was just a cover for cannibalism among the upper classes of those peoples. Regular access to protein gives you a lot of advantages over depending on ‘beans, maize, and squash’ to be available in sufficient quantities at the same time.
They had an incredibly large water network for transport- their trade ranged from the East Coast to the Rockies, the Great lakes where they obtained copper to the Gulf and Florida, where Indians dug canal networks for canoes; Cahokia’s people may have, too, though centuries of seasonal flooding would have erased them.
Clubs have been found at Cahokia containing the teeth of Great White sharks; conch shells from the Gulf and Atlantic were carved at Cahokia and traded further west to Spiro, Oklahoma. Mica from the Appalachians was also found. Flint from Texas. And Cahokian artifacts are found all over.
Note: this topic is from . Thanks BenLurkin.
It was Spam!
“...may have conducted ritual human sacrifices...”
“Hear the High Priest - the Gods are angry and have withheld us food. They require a suitable sacrifice!”
And sure enough, kill off a thousand people, and everyone now has more food!
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum, or Medieval Climatic Anomaly was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that may have been related to other warming events in other regions during that time, including China[1] and other areas,[2][3] lasting from c.;950 to c.1250
There was an extreme 50-year drought that started around 1130 AD that that is cited as being responsible for the decline of the Pueblo peoples at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico (it is a really neat place to visit).
It's not impossible that drought could have been brought by medieval warm period, and resultant changes in weather patterns. I was mistaken in trying to connect the decline of the Chaco culture to the Maunder Minimum, that would have been 500 years too early (Maunder Minimum was middle 1600s, not 1100s), so it's more likely the Medieval Warm Period was responsible for the change.
PS - I was trying to figure out when I posted the blurb you responded to, thinking that I wasn't on line yesterday and posting to FR. It's August 19, but from 2016.
Wow this is an old thread someone resurrected! I did not even look at the date of the article.
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