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.

SPUCK;849652 wrote:

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...

DanaC;849679 wrote:

[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.

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:

Trilby;849669 wrote:

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.

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.

The site is still thought to be sacred and Native Americans believe it is a source of powerful psychic energy.

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.

CaliforniaMama;849772 wrote:

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

hope it's haunted?

CaliforniaMama;849757 wrote:

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.

You don't live on a little island.
Foot once told me that we'd run out of oil to make plastic bottles far sooner than we'd run out of space to bury them. That spoke to me about the huge expanse of America.

You can save some space to preserve history if you can spare some to bury stuff that could be recycled.

Of course I suggest you learn from us. Preserve some, but also knock down beautiful places and build execrations next to them. I suppose it provides architects a cheeky smile to see the juxtaposition. Unless they are all inducted into a secret "who can bulid the ugliest building" contest. And trust me, I live in a town blighted by the '60s. And pretty much every decade from since then. Oh wait. I mean DON'T learn from us.

Our history is ten-a-penny, so we're casual about it. But in odd woods and fields or preserved in publicly accessible basements of office blocks (our cities cities have layer upon of layer of history) and in strange corners of the country, we still have the past. It anchors you.

Archeological finds are not such a problem here, although burial sites have to be respected.

The fun thing here is that all the really juicy mineral deposits are usually directly under the really important sacred sites. Like, sacred to people living today. This can cause tension.

Easy, just kill the people it's sacred to... or allow them to build casinos.

SPUCK;849652 wrote:

sigh - kiss the bridge goodbye.

They can move the location of the bridge, they can't move the location of the city.

DanaC;849679 wrote:

more higgledypiggledy

New user title. :p:

There are many more astonishing Native American things to find. And further in the past than we expect.

With any luck we will find the bridge they used across the Mississippi and we won't have to build a new one.

I went back to Cahokia
But my city was gone
There was no train station
There was no downtown
South Howard had disappeared
All my favorite places
My city had been pulled down
Reduced to parking spaces
A, o, way to go Cahokia

Well I went back to Cahokia
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
A, o, oh way to go Cahokia

I went back to Cahokia
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Cahokia
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And Muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga falls
Said, a, o, oh way to go Cahokia

xoxoxoBruce;849729 wrote:

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.

One of my old fencing buddies is an archeologist who does these kinds of digs. It is interesting that the money to do the work is never there until a bridge, mall, or gas pipeline comes through. Projects around here have the advantage of undeveloped space to shift to. I imagine the Mississippi bridge is pretty site specific. Everything points to a much higher population density than previously thought, so I guess we have more history in America than we think.

The number of natives in the western hemisphere circa 1492 seems to be about 40 million. Working back the 25,000 years or so there seems to have been natives, it's easy to come up with maybe 100 million have lived (and left trash behind) in the Americas.

Of course most of their trash was organic, therefore long gone, but of the more durable stuff of metal/stone/bone/clay, I'd guess we haven't seen most of it.

As I understand it the Poplar St Bridge carries I-70, I-64, I-55, and sundry traffic over the river into St Louis. The new bridge will carry a rerouted I-70 over the river further north entering St Louis at Cass St. This is quite a ways from the Cahokia Mounds Park which is already penned in by I-70, I-55, I-64, I-255 and suburbia, so I don't see how this project affects that. If they're saying the Cahokia site should be much bigger, the new bridge is the least of their problems.
Methinks the Mail is hyperboling.

Griff;849835 wrote:

Everything points to a much higher population density than previously thought, so I guess we have more history in America than we think.

Like what Lisa said to her mother when Marge 'discovered' the internet: "I'm proud of you, mom. You're like Christopher Columbus. You discovered something millions of people knew about before you."

The number of natives in the western hemisphere circa 1492 seems to be about 40 million. Working back the 25,000 years or so there seems to have been natives, it's easy to come up with maybe 100 million have lived (and left trash behind) in the Americas.

These numbers seemed high to me, so I had to go and look stuff up.
The 25,000 years I'll go along with, although it's not really certain. There's quite a puzzle about the early migration to the Americas.

But 40,000,000 in 1492? That a HECK of a lot. And it would project backwards over just a few generations to well over the 100 million all time tally you wrote. Did you mean 4 million?

Wiki has a good article with estimates and discussion of the difficulty of fixing a solid number.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas

There are a lot of known sites and the mound builders did a lot of work...

ZenGum;849919 wrote:

These numbers seemed high to me, so I had to go and look stuff up.
The 25,000 years I'll go along with, although it's not really certain. There's quite a puzzle about the early migration to the Americas.

But 40,000,000 in 1492? That a HECK of a lot. And it would project backwards over just a few generations to well over the 100 million all time tally you wrote. Did you mean 4 million?

No, 40 million, from here.
You can see by the chart there have been a number of scholars weigh in on this and it seems to have come back to 40 million in the latest thinking. Remember this isn't the US, this is the Americas, two continents.

Assuming the 25,000 years holds up, and looking at the recent excavations in central and south america, show the Inca 9-16 million, Maya 2 million, Aztec 25 million, populations that had several boom/bust cycles. Those are just the major groups. There's a whole lot of generations in 25K years, and would add up to a shitload of people, methinks over 100 million.

You can't sacrifice 84,000 people in four days, to dedicate the temple, unless you have a surplus. :haha:

Yeah I was just gong to say, there'd have been a bucket load more of them if they hadn't sacrificed so many.

Didn't realize it was THAT many.
What a bunch of dorks.