Posted on 04/24/2021 8:58:42 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Excavations at the city, famous for its pre-Columbian mounds, challenge the idea that residents destroyed the city through wood clearing.
A thousand years ago, a city rose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near what eventually became the city of St. Louis. Sprawling over miles of rich farms, public plazas and earthen mounds, the city — known today as Cahokia — was a thriving hub of immigrants, lavish feasting and religious ceremony. At its peak in the 1100s, Cahokia housed 20,000 people, greater than contemporaneous Paris.
By 1350, Cahokia had largely been abandoned, and why people left the city is one of the greatest mysteries of North American archaeology.
Now, some scientists are arguing that one popular explanation — Cahokia had committed ecocide by destroying its environment, and thus destroyed itself — can be rejected out of hand. Recent excavations at Cahokia led by Caitlin Rankin, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, show that there is no evidence at the site of human-caused erosion or flooding in the city.
Rather than absolutely ruining the landscape, she added, Cahokians seem to have re-engineered it into something more stable.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Normally a lack of a sewage system and the accompanying vermin and disease are the reasons an old city became uninhabitable.
Well, it was a Southern Death Cult. I know they don’t call it that anymore.
OHIO PING!
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What Doomed the Great City of Cahokia? Not Ecological Hubris, Study Says
NYT ^ | April 24, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET | Asher Elbein
Posted on 4/24/2021, 11:58:42 AM by BenLurkin
Straws and plastic bags.
Well, not a sinking civ, but even as late as the 1927 Mississippi River floods over thousands of sq miles in the lower river, thousands of flood refugees got to the old Indian mounds across the delta and Mississippi-Louisiana flatlands and waited out the days until the flood waters receded on the mounds.
My opinion? The first Indian mounds were built near the village to serve as a last-minute shelter against sudden catastrophic floods. No mounds? No hills very, very close-by (accessible in minutes by foot)? Then the tribal village died out. Feel the flood waters rise, get to the mound, the people survive.
Then, after centuries of successfully surviving floods, the mounds got higher and higher, more and more expensive to “build a better/bigger/higher/wide mound than the next priest” started up.
So St Louis used to be called Cahokia.
Home of Cahokia barbecue!
It’s just not the same.
Antifa and BLM.
Thanks for the pings. Let's use this for the Digest ping this week.
Naaa, a couple of generations of worthless “progressives” took over. That’ll muck up anything.
There are some very interesting YouTube videos on the Cahokians. Take a peek.
They had a shot as a long-term civilization, and blew it.
Would have been interesting for the conquistadors (sp) if they had kept growing.
The Cliff Notes version: Indigenous immigrants good, clever and at one with Nature. European immigrants bad, brutish and at war with Nature.
They probably failed the same way every other civilization has failed - when people who give more to the nation than they take eventually die out and are replaced by people who take more from the nation that they give.
jdsteel wrote: “Normally a lack of a sewage system and the accompanying vermin and disease are the reasons an old city became uninhabitable.”
Watch some of those shows on pre-historic cities and cultures. Almost all of those shows attribute any decline to “climate change”.
There’s a wonderful book “Hotel of the Mysteries” which is a parody of archaeology. Far in the future, archaeologists unearth a present day motel. They construct all sorts of stories about how it was a place to bury the dead, the abandoned cars were the remnants of hearses, the toilet was a way to contact the spirits of the underworld, etc. It’s hilarious and will cause you to think every time you see a show based upon archaeology.
“ At its peak in the 1100s, Cahokia housed 20,000 people, greater than contemporaneous Paris.”
How many times before or since was Paris ravaged by disease or other calamity? Who kept re-populating it, and why not this Cahokia?
I still think that we do not understand these American “cities” and try to impose a European understanding on them.
Cities serve a purpose. More segmentation, division and specialization of labor is one element of city life. The second is that among the labor element is the development of leisure and work time for thinking and creating. More inventions get developed. “Elites” develop and the elites become the controllers. Elites devise the official and accepted terms. In time the elites produce the calcification of the society the earlier generations of their class helped develop. People start to move away from the central control of the cities. Some of the inventions and mores of the city migrate with the people.
Our own society is in the process of developing the end of its cities, and the end of our society as we know it. The elites are calcifying everything, turning all politics into religion, with orthodoxy, blasphemy, and punishment for objectors increasing. They - the elites - inherited a lot, and they will destroy what their grand parents and great grand parents built.
They had pyramids in America?
Why does this and other links lead with ‘not secure’. Anyone?
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