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New study debunks myth of Cahokia's demise


Still Waters

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A University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist has dug up ancient human feces, among other demographic clues, to challenge the narrative around the legendary demise of Cahokia, North America's most iconic pre-Columbian metropolis.

In its heyday in the 1100s, Cahokia—located in what is now southern Illinois—was the center for Mississippian culture and home to tens of thousands of Native Americans who farmed, fished, traded and built giant ritual mounds.

By the 1400s, Cahokia had been abandoned due to floods, droughts, resource scarcity and other drivers of depopulation. But contrary to romanticized notions of Cahokia's lost civilization, the exodus was short-lived, according to a new UC Berkeley study.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-debunks-myth-cahokia-native-american.html

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The Illini were part of the Hopewell Horizon and related to the Fort Ancient Culture. They were probably the original residents.

What happened in Cahokia was Algonquians learned fast why not to build a city and went back to agro-foresty.

C.G. Mann already noted this and Archaeologists knew it wasn't a "lost tribe" for about 2 decades, at least. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've been to the Cahokia Mounds park a few times.  Pretty cool place to visit if you are in the St. Louis area.   

If I remember correctly, the population may have reached around 40,000 at one point.   

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  • 1 year later...

Whatever ultimately caused inhabitants to abandon Cahokia, it was not because they cut down too many trees, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Archaeologists from Arts & Sciences excavated around earthen mounds and analyzed sediment cores to test a persistent theory about the collapse of Cahokia, the pre-Columbian Native American city in southwestern Illinois that was once home to more than 15,000 people.

No one knows for sure why people left Cahokia, though many environmental and social explanations have been proposed.

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-scant-evidence-wood-overuse-cahokia.html

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On 4/10/2021 at 4:14 AM, Eldorado said:

No one knows for sure why people left Cahokia, though many environmental and social explanations have been proposed.

Correction/addition on my previous post. One theory is they are descendants of the Southern Siouians. (Osage, Kansa, Quapaw, Wichita etc.) and one group of refugees settled Aztalan in Wisconsin, tried to practice cannibalism on the locals and were rubbed out by folks who really didn't care to be eaten. 

In addition, I think I stressed before that cannibalism in Native North America wasn't religious but a "political statement" telling enemies that they weren't human beings but wild animals.  

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