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 ...
Looks nice! Thanks for the link. In this context, if Cahokia was built in 20 years, doesn’t it seem reasonable that other mounds were... ?
;’)
Mostly in northeast Iowa, but I know of several in Wright and Franklin Counties. Well-known to hunters and other outdoorsmen.
Definitely.
There was an article about it in the 1960s, probably “Argosy” or “True” magazine (my dad subscribed), and as a consequence, during a family vacation, I climbed the thing. It was already being studied, but like most Precolumbian sites, it consisted of, well, a freakin’ mound of dirt. I would have preferred to have taken a station wagon trip to, say, Egypt or Greece, but they hadn’t put in the freeway yet. ;’)
Yep. Usually they contain bones and surprisingly few artifacts, so unless they are unusually large, they are forgotten or of only local interest.
The most interesting thing about these mound-builder sites is that they generally (not always) turn out to be part of a layout that resembles cities in the pyramid-building civs of Central America and Mexico.
Some time in the early to mid 50s my father bought a barn near Swanton, Nebraska for its lumber. We spent a number of winter Saturdays disassembling it and hauling the lumber home. One day he took a different route and pointed out a series of 5-10 ft. high mounds in what was then a cow pasture. He said they were Indian mounds. There might have been a dozen or so. Years later, I looked for them both with a fly over with my brother in his small plane and later driving around. Never did find them again. My guess is that they bulldozed them down & farmed the ground.
I had a classmate who (during the middle-school or perhaps even elementary years) spoke of a single small mound his family had flattened out, claimed they’d found what was left of a burial. A pasture into a farm move probably accounts for similar destruction.
Is that why the Midwest is so flat?
Flat is where it’s at! ;’)
It’s only 18 miles from Ferguson!!!
Pikers! Earth Mounds are so easy.
The Great Pyramid is supposed to have been build in about 20 years and it is composed of over 1,000,000 hewn stones weighing 2.5 tons on average—and those savvy Egyptians would have had to have quarried, transported and installed one dressed stone into place every seven seconds.
Eazie Peezie according to Egyptologists.
Of course the ancients moved bigger stones for projects in Baalbeck, Lebanon, Mexico, Puma Puncu in Peru and Stonehenge(s)but for sheer size and stone moving, nothing beats the Pyramids of Egypt.
To think the Egyptians built those things without the help of one Mexican.
The conventional estimate for the number of stones in the Great Pyramid is over 2 million; in the 1990s there was a paper in KMT that made a more meticulous estimate and came up with something north of 5 million (there are many different sizes). A lot of work, regardless — even given that it’s likely that they weren’t quarried per se, but poured like cement.
Poured? First I’ve heard of that theory. Been watching Ancient Aliens, eh?
We all know ALL govt projects take 20 years...cant finish until all the govt union workers are guaranteed retirement.
No, mister smart aleck, it’s from a book about, hmm, 25, 30 years ago. It’s literally the only construction method that will work given the time frame. In modern times, in South America, a small mountain was found to have gold deposits. Thousands of men with individual claims (I think they’re 12 feet square or something) dug the soil away to find bits of gold, one 40 pound bag at a time. Where the mountain was, there is now a pit. Having loose, mined materials carried up the pyramid (with or without Houdin’s internal ramp — his ramp idea works with geopolymerization, but the reverse is not the case) in bags or baskets, 40 pounds at a time, would be sustainable by a chalcolithic civilization, which they were at the time.
http://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/
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