A Stone Pyramid At Cahokia, Illinois

Archaeologists have made an astonishing discovery at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site: what appears to be a large stone structure beneath the site's biggest earthen mound.

The site was discovered accidentally Jan. 24 during drilling to construct a water-drainage system within Monks Mound, the largest Indian mound north of Mexico and the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the New World.

"This is astounding," said William Woods, an archaeologist with Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, who is leading the investigation of the mystery structure. "It's so unexpected that it would never have entered your mind before."

The stone is at least 32 feet (10 meters) long in one of its dimensions. It is buried about 40 feet below the surface of a terrace on the western side of Monks Mound and well above the mound's bottom. Researchers believe it may be made of cobbles or slabs of limestone or sandstone.

Even if the apparent structure turns out to be no larger than this, it would be a dramatic find. Stone does not occur naturally at Cahokia (which is the Mississippi River valley about 20 miles (32 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis, Missouri--J.T.) so any stone would have had to be brought by humans. Stone is uncommon at excavations there.

"There's no question this is a unique discovery," said Melvin Fowler, an archaeologist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "It's totally unexpected."

Fowler, reached by telephone in his office Friday, is widely considered the godfather of Cahokia archaeology.

Cahokia Mounts is the largest archaeological site in the United States and has the biggest mounds and the greatest number of mounds anywhere. The site is named for a sub-tribe of Illini Indians who lived there when the French arrived in the 1600s. At its peak around 1100 A.D., the area was covered with a community of 20,000 people.

The mystery was discovered about 10 o'clock on a cold, windy Saturday morning amid snow flurries as workers drilled into the western side of the mound.

Andy Martignoni Jr. and Steve Fulton, both SIUE archaeologists, were on duty at the site when the drill operator reported hitting a rock about 140 feet into the side of the hill. He drilled on, but the drill bit broke after cutting through about 32 feet of rock. Martignonia and Fulton talked the situation over for a few minutes.

"We talked about a possible drain, a tomb, al kinds of wild stuff," Martignoni said. Comparing the 'feel' of the drill with countless other operations, the drill operator told them the structure seemed to be made of large stones apparently placed together.

Martignoni called Woods, who had just gone to bed after staying up all night writing a report.

"You won't believe this," Martignoni told him. "We hit some stone at Monks Mound."

Woods and his collegues plan to investigate the finding this summer without harming the mound. Investigative techniques to be used will include seismic waves, drilling and testing for electromagnetic impulses.

(See the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for March 9, 1998, "Cahokia mounds finding stuns archeologists -- A large stone under the site's biggest mound may be a man-made structure," by William Allen, Post-Dispatch Science Writer.

They are conducting a few good digs there, and can probably use extra hands if anyone wants to join in this summer.

They found a hellacious cache of stone celts nearby, up in O'Fallon, I believe. One of them was HUGE. Most were unfinished.

An interesting theory being bounced around now is that the great shell finds at Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma and other places might actually have been made in the Cahokia area and traded. The reason is that the Cahokia region has all the hallmarks of what passed for industry at the time- microdrills everywhere, unfinished goods, broken items that appeared to have been damaged in manufacture before being completed, large caches of blanks or unfinished items, while the Spiro region has plenty of finished products and virtually no worn tools or microdrills. There will definitely be a lot of new discoveries coming out of this area.

They haven't done too much more with the finding of limestone up in the mound, but it is interesting. There are so many sites being destroyed every year in that area that it is all they can do to get to them, much less get involved with the big mound. John Kelly is an archaeologist spearheading an effort to salvage local sites before they are lost... he has something called the Powell Archaeological Research Center, names after the fantastic great mound destroyed in the last century by dorks looking for fill dirt. If you are interested in the research going on in this area, he is the right guy to get in contact with. Check out this page with details on current research:

Powell Archaeology Research Center

"One of the intellectual landmarks of this decade."
Literary Review

On 6th July 1960 Lt Colonel Harold Ohlmeyer, a United States Airforce Commander, sent a reply to a letter from one Professor Charles Hapgood who had requested his opinion on a feature found on a map of 1513 AD called the Piri Reis Map. Lt Colonel Ohlmeyer's reply was a bombshell. The map, showing the coastline of the east coast of the Americas and the west coast of Africa, the Colonel remarked, also seemed to show the coastline of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica free of ice - a condition it had not been in for some 9000 years!

In fact, it is only in recent times that modern man has been able to map this coastline using sub-surface surveying techniques that can penetrate the ice sheet that lies on top of it.

Ohlmeyer had no idea how a map existing in the 16th century could have got hold of such knowledge.

This was one of the many mysteries that lead Graham to begin his epic journey into man's past that is Fingerprints of the Gods - and it is a mystery whose solution is mindblowing.

Travelling first to South and Meso-America, Graham finds evidence of myths of a white-skinned 'god' named Quetzalcoatl or 'Viracocha' who came from a drowned land bringing knowledge of farming and culture after a great flood. Tied in with these myths Graham begins to crack an ancient code imprinted in these ancient tales that refer to the 'great mill' of the heavens.

It is an astronomical code that deals with the position of the stars over vast periods of time - a code that reveals the ancients knew far, far more than they are generally credited with. Traces of the same code appear in Egyptian myth, and it is to this desert land that Graham and Santha travel, finding there haunting parallels in architecture and ritual to the New World sites they have just left behind.

Moreover, the whole layout of the Giza plateau seems to point to a date many thousands of years earlier than the date of its supposed construction - a date revealed in the astronomical alignments of the Pyramids, the 'mansions of a million years', home of the god Osiris, the bringer of agriculture to the Egyptians, like Quetzalcoatl, after a flood.

Could the Piri Reis maps be evidence for a previously unknown complex maritime civilisation, capable of mapping the globe? A global culture, cataclysmically destroyed at the end of the ice age, remnants of which survived the devastation to pass on their knowledge to the shaken world?

Were the figures of Osiris and Quetzalcoatl survivors of this lost race - passing down not only advanced geographical knowledge, but a secret astronomical code veiled in myth that pointed to the devastation in the past, and warned of that which is to come?

From the mysterious sites of Tiahuanaco and Teotihuacan, to the enduring enigmatic Sphinx and pyramids of Egypt, the grandiose Nazca lines of Peru to the stark primal beauty of the Osireion at Abydos, this is a journey both around the globe and into the heart of the true prehistoric origins of man. Part adventure, part detective story, this book will force you to revaluate your beliefs of the past.

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.

· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic ·
	Gods Graves Glyphs	Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are Blam, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
· Google · Archaeologica · ArchaeoBlog · Archaeology magazine · Biblical Archaeology Society · · Mirabilis · Texas AM Anthropology News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · · History or Science & Nature Podcasts · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists ·