Posted on 07/12/2024 7:16:48 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The mysterious, sudden abandonment of the ancient lost city of Cahokia by its inhabitants has been puzzling historians for a long time now – and experts have cast fresh doubt on one of the most popular theories to date...
Around the middle of the 14th century, the 50,000 or so people who called the bustling, vibrant city home departed for other places, suggesting that something pretty dramatic and life-changing had taken place.
One explanation for this mass exodus has blamed a severe drought followed by widespread crop failure – but a new investigation from the US Bureau of Land Management and Washington University in St. Louis suggests otherwise...
Here, the research team analyzed soil samples taken deep underground, looking for carbon isotopes (left behind atoms) that act as indicators for the types of crops being planted across the centuries.
Different plants leave different carbon signatures, and the researchers were able to work out that two particular carbon isotopes – Carbon-12 and Carbon-13 – stayed fairly consistent across the period when people were leaving Cahokia. That suggests that drought and crop failure weren't what was happening...
However, while these soil samples give us clues about what didn't happen, they don't really tell us what did happen. The authors of this study think it may have been a more gradual process than we thought, with a lot of contributing factors.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
The rest of the keyword, sorted:
It’s Illinois, I blame property taxes.
Around the middle of the 14th century..............Europe was having Black Plagues at the same time...................
The shaman’s union pension fund bankrupted them. The tribe moved to Florida.
The inhabitants of Cahokia left nothing in any writing, at least nothing that has been found. That raises questions about the intellectual means and methods they employed in creating Cahokia. Like how were measures taken? How were successful means and methods transmitted for repeated use? How were their stories told and passed on, orally alone? And many other questions that answers are often found for in other ancient civilizations that had methods of writing.
Though the absense of other evidence makes a connection unlikely, what a coincidence that the Black Death ravaged Europe and Asia in the mid-14th century. Nothing like a plague to make concentrated populations disperse, economies and trade break down, etc.
If the writing or symbolic representations were all done on organic materials it would be hard for anything to survive. For example, the Inca knotted ropes. Only the Mesoamericans seem to have devised a hieroglyphic system that has survived because a few organic codices were kept during the Spanish conquest plus extensive use of carved stone architecture and monuments.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
In other words, a primitive, backwater Paleolithic tribe that was incapable of evolving beyond the Stone Age.
The US Bureau of Land Management is footing the bill for this make-work, pointless slab of pork, because?
The Washington University in St. Louis, no doubt, funneled a nice portion of the BLM grant monies back to the DNC, while
employing a small contingent of rabid Lefties with a paycheck.
(They are to blame for everything else bad that ever happened, so why not this?)
What you postulate may be true and it somewhat goes with how Cahokia was built, which was not with stone (at least not large massive stones) which says something about what natural materials were available around Cahokia. Maybe without a lot of available natural stone formations, “organic” materials would have been used for whatever “records” they kept.
Which takes us back to the Inca and it makes me think others before the Inca built many of the massive stone works that have been attributed to the Inca, as I do not see the knotted cords of the Inca as equal to the task of transmitting the sophisticated methods in building the massiv stone works. I think maybe the Inca inherited them and just took them over. Maybe wh they took them over from were peoples who were there during the last ice age.
Wasn’t this about the time that there was a suspected major volcanic eruption that resulted in colder temperatures and a lot of crop failures? I’m guessing they migrated south.
I know 536 was suspected for that and the Justinean plagues were thought to be inflated due to the resulting malnutrition.
The black plague was in the 14th century in Europe - I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a similar eruption related climate event resulting in failed crops and malnutrition related disease susceptibility as well.
In the 14th century western Europe was a meteorological mess. France was having way too much rain and it was cold. Crops failed again and again. The 1400s reversed all that and things got most excellent again.
But Cahokia apparently didn’t have bad weather or crop failures. I always assumed that they were having a bad time too, but no.
Maybe the population was getting too big for the available hoof protein, and they left for greener pastures.
Like field stone fences, they found or created blocks of varying sizes that could be fitted. They then cut/chipped the stone down to a pretty close fit and applied a thin, special paste mortar when the stones were set. When wet the paste dissolved the last few millimeters of the rough faces of the stone, the paste washed out and the stone fit together with microscopic tolerances.
The close fit of irregular stone made the walls very earthquake resistant. Really freaking clever.
Graboids
Bookmark
Their dispersal is apparently what gave us all the different tribes of the US plains and Midwest.................
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.