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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...

A Black Lives Matter activist has claimed he was shot in the groin with a rubber bullet during a protest in Los Angeles, causing him to lose a testicle. South African native Bradley Steyn, who was involved in anti-apartheid protests in South Africa when he was younger, claims the LAPD are responsible for his injuries, and he now plans to sue. Steyn claims he was attacked by law enforcement during a May 30 George Floyd protest in Los Angeles' Fairfax district. . . . 'At the march I was shot by a member of the LAPD with a rubber bullet...

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...

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Manmade mounds shaped like orcas, condors and even a duck may be the oldest evidence of animal mounds outside of North America, according to former University of Missouri anthropologist. Writing in the magazine Antiquity, Robert Benfer, a professor emeritus, describes a series of mounds, some more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) across, in coastal valleys in Peru. Archaeological evidence at the sites pegs some at more than 4,000 years old. "It's going to shake everybody's views," Benfer told LiveScience. "The previous oldest animal figures were at Nazca and they're 2,000 years old." The Nazca Lines are simple stone outlines of...

Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

COLLINSVILLE -- Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in "Cahokia -- Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi." According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville. Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead. Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive...

Much still to be learned about Cahokia Mounds By ELIZABETH DONALD, AP COLLINSVILLE, Ill. (Map, News) - It's so much a part of the landscape that metro-east residents often don't even notice it, except when a visiting relative notices: "Look, there's the mound." Rising from what once was an endless grass sea parted by the Mississippi River, Monks Mound isn't even named after the Native American Indians who built it centuries ago, but the Trappist monks who lived there for only five years in the 19th century. No one knows what the long-vanished people who built the mounds called themselves,...

Many Freepers are probably too young to remember but I can remember the day that when you bought an Almond Joy or a Mounds bar, you got the entire bar. Not "two halfs" sold as a "whole". At some point during the early 1970s, Peter Paul decided to sell these popular bars as two individual pieces as opposed to a whole bar. I trace this seminal event as a turning point in my life - when I started to become cynical and jaded. I forget the exact circumstances but I seem to remember these candy bars weighed in the neighborhood...

FOUR thousand years ago work began to erect the great earthen burial mounds that comprise the Bronze Age barrow cemetery at the Knowes of Trotty, in Harray, Orkney. There are at least 16 barrows - or graves - in two rows, nestling between the edge of the farmlands and the foot of the moorland. Many were raised upon natural mounds to enhance their prominence. It is a spectacular site, even today, and there are indications that in the Bronze Age the Knowes of Trotty was a cemetery of special significance. The barrows were built to honour the dead of the...

Archeologists Find Ancient Burial Mounds Wed Nov 9, 9:15 PM ET YEREVAN, Armenia - Archeologists said Wednesday they have unearthed burial mounds dating back to the third millennium B.C. which they believe contain remains and trinkets from ancient Aryan nomads. Historian Hakob Simonian said Wednesday that the four mounds were among 30 discovered about 35 miles west of the Armenian capital Yerevan, containing beads made of agate, carnelian and as well as the remains of what appears to be a man, aged 50-55. Also found were remains of domesticated horses and glazed pottery appearing to show chariots, Simonian said. The...

After watering my yard day and night for a couple of weeks, I finally brought it back to life( in the midst of drought). So I set about mowing this morning and quickly found my feet sinking into the earth into what I thought were ant mounds. But no ants to be found when I extricated my foot. I found this vexing but pressed on. And it happened again. And again, until I stepped into one especially deep soft soft spot and turned my ankle rather nastily. These mounds/soft spots just popped up seemingly overnight and I'm at a loss...

Tantalizing clues in ancient mounds 05/04/2005 The Asahi Shimbun SAGA-Ancient mounds here may be among the nation's oldest and prove that the original owners were pretty inventive for their day. Recent excavations at the Higashimyo archeological site indicate the shell mounds date back 7,000 years-to the early Jomon Period (8000 B.C.-300 B.C.). Higashimyo has western Japan's largest such mounds. They are believed to have been created by the dumping of shells and other refuse. Remains of more than 40 baskets, hand-woven from thin strips of wood, have been found there. Experts say they may be the oldest so far discovered....