January 23, 2013 Lost City of Cahokia
 

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Lost City of Cahokia (near modern day St. Louis)*
"Archaeologists digging in preparation for the Mississippi River spanning bridge - which will connect Missouri and Illinois - discovered the lost city of Cahokia beneath modern St Louis. Their findings pointed to a 'sophisticated, sprawling metropolis stretching across both sides of the Mississippi. At its peak between 1100 and 1200, the city




MOre

sigh - kiss the bridge goodbye.

fuck the bridge- this is much more important and interesting and will bring dollars to the area. I think it's really cool they found something like this here in 'merica where nothing is older or wiser than your average 20 year old.


eta: that story about the Roman brothel coin was pretty interesting. It must be so surreal to make a find like that. I read about the Saxon (?) hoarde of gold weaponry made by some dude in the west-middle part of England. How incredible to come upon something like that. Was really cool -- but it was perplexing as all the weapons had been bent up and broken on purpose. They thought maybe it was an offering of some sort to some god or other.

Wow. That's exciting stuff. That suggests a very different culture to what's been posited before for that time and place, right?

right. very different. This is really new stuff-i'm so glad they found it.

Love stuff like this. When a piece of the past suddenly presents itself like this it is really astonishing. Can overturn years of academic study overnight, or confirm things long thought unconfirmable.



[eta] That little bit of landscape could almost be in Britain. If it was a little less straight looking, more higgledypiggledy...but with the grass covered mound just nestling amongst working farmland.

To lose one city of Cahokia may be regarded as misfortune...

Exactly what I thought!

I love it when people find areas of mosiac, in tact and in situ.
And just work around something that has been there since Roman times.
Bill Bryson described one such place in Gloucestershire.

They've know it was there for a long time, part of a chain of "urban" centers stretching as far as Florida. Being off limits to amateurs, and not much chance of finding treasure, it's left to the government to explore. What the proposed bridge brought was the money and mandate to dig into the details of the layout and construction.

And we read about it in the fucking Mail?

:facepalm:

I've spent my life along the coast of California. All of this land was once inhabited by Native Americans, my ancestors.

In one small town, where the land was cheap, they had the bright idea to build an open-air mall with stores below and condos above. When doing a project like this in this area, a Native American (or an expert?) must be on hand in case anything appears in the digging.

In this case, the mall was to be built on land that had been inhabited by the Ohlone. There was a big to-do about the whole thing. Some said it was sacred land and others claimed it was the village dump due to the number of fractured shell pieces.

The mall was built, the area was named Shellmound because that is what it had been and a monument was in place to honor and inform visitors about the Ohlone that had once lived there.

The mall did not do well. It has struggled to survive all these years. Every so often there is a protest against the mall being on Native land.

When do we move on? We can't preserve every bit of land that had been inhabited by other people or we'd never have any place to live.

Look at the digs they are doing in (Israel? I can't remember now.) where they are digging undeveloped land in the middle of a city. The old city continues on under the developed areas.

It is a tricky balance.

They need the bridge and they need to uncover and discover the city that was found. Hopefully, they can find a way to do both before they completely destroy each other and the project.

In the US, there is very little left that has any historical significance. We're just too young. I think we should do everything within reason to preserve truly significant stuff like the site of an ancient city half a millennium old.

This is what was said about Shellmound, too. What are we supposed to do with that?

We're losing all our civil war battlefields, etc. Nothing is sacred here except the almighty dollar.

hope it's haunted?