Posted on 08/19/2016 11:42:09 AM PDT by BenLurkin
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 Choctaw, the Ofo. Archaeologists conducting strontium tests on the teeth of buried remains have found a third of the population was “not from Cahokia, but somewhere else”, according to Emerson, who is director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. “And that’s throughout the entire sequence [of Cahokia’s existence.]”
The Native Americans at Cahokia farmed, traded and hunted. They were also early urban planners, who used astronomical alignments to lay out a low-scale metropolis of 10-20,000 people, featuring a town centre with broad public plazas and key buildings set atop vast, hand-built earthen mounds. The largest of these mounds was 100 feet tall and covered 14 acres – and still exists today.
But rather than developing, like London, into a modern metropolis, Cahokia is more like the fabled lost continent of Atlantis. Having become a major population centre around AD1050, by 1350 it was largely abandoned by its people – and no one is sure why. Neither war, disease, nor European conquest drove Cahokia’s residents from their homes. Indeed, the first white man to reach these lands, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, didn’t do so until 1540.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Go figure.
This article is written as if these folks had diversity training, had to stop reading it, so freakin’ stupid. I’m telling you you can’t ready anything today without a leftist world view interjected into the story.
Little Ice Age?
That's true to some extent. Nomads don't tend toward mass human sacrifice. Neither does it seem to have been common in dispersed village civilizations. It's an urban thing. The Romans and Greeks weren't into it, but Carthage and Babylon were. Likewise the urban civilizations of Central American. When societal advancement goes horribly wrong, you tend to get human sacrifice. See, for example the vile practice of pre-natal infanticide in the civilizations of late XX and early XXI Century North America. These "Americans" in particular sacrificed babies by the millions to their 'god' Convenience.
As the die-off of Cahokia precedes Columbus' landing in the New World which caused a die-off in Central and South America, it can't be blamed on the diseases the Spaniards brought over, but the time frame matches the die-off caused by the diseases the Vikings brought to Newfoundland.
You can bet that early liberals took control and taxed their civilization out of existence. Probably, for the safety of children they took away bows and arrows too.
Liberals: "Oh, how cosmopolitan! How, how...multicultural!"
Duh people, they were either captives for sacrifice or slaves from other regions. Come on.
Remember the Dust Bowl that drove farmers out of the Midwestern USA from 1932 until 1938, when the rains finally returned to normal? An similar weather event some time between 1300 and 1350 AD probably did the same thing.
No way to blame whitey for this. Liberals are sad.
Very possible that the little ice age changed things pretty rapidly in the SW. Chaco Canyon, a thriving area of trade and travel, was abandoned around that time. It's very high desert (over 6,000' up) and the winds blow hard through there normally.
The climate went through a heavy drought there about 1100 AD that lasted 50 years or better.
There's evidence that farming was being done, and there's barely a trickle of water in what used to be a fairly large river that would have run through the middle of the canyon. I'm thinking that the little ice age may have been an impact, but wonder more if the overall pattern changed for good, the initial drought, then lower overall rainfall to the point they had to move farther east toward the Rio Grande. The Sahara was once lush and inhabited by flora, fauna, and people. It changed over time. Nothing to say the same didn't happen here.
Coincidentally, there is also a fancy new ghost international airport there too.
From the article: "the land was flood-prone"
Not too bright, these journalists.
Because cities in an era with no vaccines were just a big epidemics waiting to happen.
Not to mention, that you have to bring food in from the countryside to feed city folks. If the land plays out or you get a bad harvest, you have go further afield - which is iffy when your transport is animal based.
To me, the amazing thing is that cities could survive at all.
Trump’s fault.
When you look at the artifacts you can see a stylistic similarity to Mexican and Central American artifacts.
The Mississippi is a navigable river all the way to the Caribbean so you can be certain that there was some level of trade and contact.
Maybe the Cahokians took copying Aztec/Mayan religion and human sacrifice too far and the local tribes, who were very warlike, took it upon themselves to wipe it out.
A document historical example is Cortez and the fall of the Aztec empire. Cortez conquered Mexico with Indian allies who were tired of Aztec domination. After Cortez’s failure on his first attempt to conquer Tenochtitlan(Mexico City) Cortés and his force returned to Tlaxcala where they were well received by people with a down-to-earth Machiavellian view. Aztec power having been challenged, various peoples whom the Aztecs had been ruling with terror and a bloody hand still saw opportunity in ridding themselves of Aztec domination, and they continued to side with Cortés and Tlaxcala.
Spanish reinforcements and supplies arrived to strengthen Cortés’ force. From Tlaxcala, Cortés won domination over neighboring territory, and in August, 1521, Cortés with an enlarged army of Spaniards and Indians, returned to Tenochtitlan. They surrounded the city and cut its outside supply of fresh water and food. They attacked the city on rafts supporting cannon, and in the city they fought block by block.
When I was young I felt sympathy for the Aztecs but when I was in college getting my BA in anthropology I became aware of what bastards the Aztecs were. There is probably no civilization, before or since, that needed the beat-down that Cortez gave to the satanic Aztecs.
Some post-conquest sources report that at the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed about 10,000 and 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. At the low estimate of 100,00 this would average about 2 sacrifices per minute during the four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the top so that the victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple. The majority of the victims were from vassal states and the visiting dignitaries of those vassal states were forced to watch their own people, offered as tribute, to be murdered.
For those who have doubts or if there are any La Raza (the Klan with a Tan) kooks reading this post please read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Estimates_of_the_scope_of_the_sacrifices
Wikipedia:
The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion (the Aeolian processes) caused the phenomenon.
American Indians used only dryland farming methods - irrigation was limited to occasional watering with jugs.
Regards,
In the 1330s China a large number of natural disasters and plagues led to widespread famine, starting in 1331, with a deadly plague arriving soon after.[19] Epidemics that may have included plague killed an estimated 25 million Chinese and other Asians during the 15 years before it reached Constantinople in 1347.
Why should we thing that the The Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) traveled only west and not east to North America?
Nah...they woke one morning in blissful Eden and realized whitey would arrive in 200 years. This triggered severe anticipated micro aggressions which made them stumble blindly around, groping for their safe spaces, until they they fell onto the sacrificial altars to the sounds of “Alahu Cahokia-bar” and got separated from their noggins.
There's your vector for the spread of (Xenopsylla cheopis) and black death in the Americas
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