Posted on 02/23/2010 6:07:26 PM PST by SunkenCiv
But there is something unique about a particular excavated area beside a rather plain looking mound -- Mound 34 -- that lies about 200 yards east of the world famous and huge Monk's Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. The carefully sifted soil at this excavation has revealed evidence of the only known copper workshop from the Mississippian-era, a culture that peaked about 1250 A.D. throughout the middle and southern portions of America. The overall Illinois state site was the location of a large, prehistoric city of perhaps 20,000 that archaeologists call Cahokia...
...the bits and pieces of the copper workshop have been studied in relation to peculiar fragments of an engraved drinking cup made from a conch shell found at the top of the about 10 foot high Mound 34. The shell, which probably came from the Gulf of Mexico, contains a very distinctive symbol, kind of an arrow-like logo with a circle in the arrowhead, that first turned up in excavations of rock shelters in Wisconsin and east central Missouri and dated from about 1000 A.D, more than two centuries before the peak of Cahokia.
Symbols found on the walls of the shelters are very similar to the shell fragments found atop Mound 34... the workshop and the shell cup fragments hint that Cahokia may have been the center and not just an outlying fringe of the ancient Mississippian culture. The true role of Cahokia undoubtedly still lies buried. Unlike many other Mississippian sites that have been heavily excavated, less than 1 percent of the mounds site has been dug. While many artifacts have turned up, scientists working the site say what is left buried may greatly change current views of the civilization, and reinforce the theory that Cahokia may have been the center of it all.
(Excerpt) Read more at bnd.com ...
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Very, very interesting.
Fascinating.
It is very interesting. But next thing we know, they’ll find a Stone Age steel workshop...then maybe silicon. ;-)
makes a guy wonder what archeologists will guess about us in 1000 years based upon what we leave behind for them to find...
You always find the coolest articles! Thanks!
When I was young, I lived not too far from Serpent Mound. You look at something like that and think...WOW It must have taken a lot of people a lot of time to do something like that. They had to have led fairly stable lives to devote that much time and energy toward something that had nothing to do with eating/surviving. Not to mention something that could only be truly appreciated from the air.
Definitely. The article has more on the discovery of this workshop, which happened over sixty years ago, but the discoverer used a bulldozer a bit too much, and a notebook with diagrams a bit too little. :’)
Thanks for posting these interesting threads. We need an occasional break from the political insanity going on today.
I shudder to think about using a bulldozer to do archaeology.
.....She cut a stump ......
How did she cut the stusmp?
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