Posted on 08/20/2018 6:00:52 AM PDT by C19fan
“What were they made of that absolutely nothing remains today?”
Dirt. The descriptions indicate earthen mounds and terraced natural hills. After a hundred years, it would just be another overgrown hill. After 300 years, including plowing and grazing, such a mound would be pretty much leveled.
I’ve heard the “R-kansas” thing before, but also remember that Twain has one of the hucksters say “arkansaw” spelling it phonetically. :^)
At the peak, Cahokia had a larger population than London and some believe Paris.
[and from the Cahokia website] One of the greatest cities of the world, Cahokia was larger than London was in AD 1250.
Cahokia was a large collection of huts built on a pile of dirt in a flood plain. It may have been the largest village in North America, but it may not have been, as well -- traces of that kind of construction are difficult to find, particularly if the site is reused or in continuous use. The same problem exists for Anglo-Saxon sites in England prior to 1066, about all that shows up is a trench or a post hole, and the wood is long gone.
The estimates for Cahokia at its peak vary widely (even wildly, anywhere from 6K to 40K), but it probably was not larger than London (est. 25K) in 1250. Paris' population was perhaps twice that.
By 1519, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was larger than any city Cortez and company had ever seen. OTOH by Queen Eliz I's time, the City (basically, the old walled Roman core of London) had grown so large (quarter million) that she was appalled and decreed no construction within a mile of the city wall.
And there are a lot of odd and large mounds (hundreds of feet in diameter and many tens of feet in hight) here and there that nobody has bothered to check out for some reason.
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Mostly these structures were destroyed to make way for farms, highways and so forth.
The reason they are neglected is that the findings would very likely contract the current meme used by ‘native’ tribes to legally justify their Federal hand outs and Special legal status (they have Rights guaranteed by the Constitution, all others have mere privileges which can be revoked at any given time) namely: they were created here; there was no one here before them. Therefore, any findings are theirs to claim and dispose of; no studying of them allowed. No archeologists wants to go through the pain and high expenses of court battles they cannot win.
Twain was just another Missouri Border Ruffian. Of course he wouldn’t know how to pronounce Kansas names properly.
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