Mounds

[uniface]

About what you'd expect from the wokescreeds at Smithsonian magazine, but not without interest if you can get past the evil white people matrix. Posted because it will probably come up sooner or later anyhow.

https://www.sott.net/article/434843...th-about-the-Midwests-mysterious-mound-cities

 

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[Kray Gelder]

I didn't see anything new in that piece. Kind of a generic filler article, IMO.

 

[uniface]

Yep. Like the Clovis site link. But when it's slow for a while, something beats nothing -- no ?

 

[Kray Gelder]

Yep. Like the Clovis site link. But when it's slow for a while, something beats nothing -- no ?

Thanks for the read. You know I'm just an interested newb, but that was a good refresher.

 

[ToddsPoint]

I've been to Cahokia dozens of times. It's just down the road a ways. As far as the satellite villages in E. St. Louis and St. Louis proper, they are long gone. A few mounds left in Forest Park. Downtown St. Louis was covered with mounds before it became St. Louis. As far as the main site, Cahokia, it's still there in (almost) all it's glory. Some development in the 60's on part of the site but so much remains. An amazing place. I started walking up the big mound (Monk's Mound) one day and found a triangle arrowpoint eroding out of the ground right next to the steps. So if you visit Cahokia, don't forget to always look down. Gary

 

[Force_of_Iron]

I've been to Cahokia dozens of times. It's just down the road a ways. As far as the satellite villages in E. St. Louis and St. Louis proper, they are long gone. A few mounds left in Forest Park. Downtown St. Louis was covered with mounds before it became St. Louis. As far as the main site, Cahokia, it's still there in (almost) all it's glory. Some development in the 60's on part of the site but so much remains. An amazing place. I started walking up the big mound (Monk's Mound) one day and found a triangle arrowpoint eroding out of the ground right next to the steps. So if you visit Cahokia, don't forget to always look down. Gary

Arrowheads and other artifacts under the ground are like the stars in the skies. So many of them after many thousands of years of production. It is amazing to think of what lies under the ground within our line of sight at any given point in time as unreachable as the depths of space. Most will never be found.

 

[GopherDaGold]

I've been to Cahokia dozens of times. It's just down the road a ways. As far as the satellite villages in E. St. Louis and St. Louis proper, they are long gone. A few mounds left in Forest Park. Downtown St. Louis was covered with mounds before it became St. Louis. As far as the main site, Cahokia, it's still there in (almost) all it's glory. Some development in the 60's on part of the site but so much remains. An amazing place. I started walking up the big mound (Monk's Mound) one day and found a triangle arrowpoint eroding out of the ground right next to the steps. So if you visit Cahokia, don't forget to always look down. Gary

Cahokia Mounds is located in Collinsville not Cahokia. I've always been confused by that.

 

[Charl]

It’s often said that history is written by the victors. Where Native American history is concerned, it was not until the late 1960’s, when I was a young grad student in history, that Native American studies, and looking at history from the perspective of Native Americans, began to take off.


It’s true that early on, American intellectuals(and in the United States, intellectuals were not held in high regard, as was the case in Europe, because, frankly, America was a series of frontier experiences, and intellectuals really brought no practical skills to the frontier. One reason, to this day, Americans often tend to look down on Ivory Tower intellectuals) interpreted any evidence for things they could not fathom as having been produced by “savages” as being instead the work of civilizations from elsewhere. One example of this was early interpretations of the Dighton Rock petroglyph site in Massachusetts:

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469634401/the-place-of-stone/

https://davidkrueger.org/2018/05/19/review-of-the-place-of-stone-dighton-rock-and-the-erasure-of-americas-indigenous-past/

(Edit: sorry these links are not clickable. For some reason, beginning today, I cannot post hyperlinks to TNet, and only to TNet. Bummer!)


Leaving aside the possibility that Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real left a “Kilroy was here” message on the rock in 1511, even as late as the 1920’s, when Brown University psychologist Edmund Delabarre researched and published his study of this rock, and other petroglyphs in New England, he concluded Native Americans could not have left marks on rocks before seeing white settlers communicate with writing!


In other words, there is indeed a very long history of attributing Native American accomplishments to others and the so-called Mound Builder Myth, that the mounds were built by Old World civilizations, had a long history before modern archaeology eradicated it. Both it, and all the oddball interpretations of Dighton Rock were examples of ethnocentrism.


Here, IMHO, is the truth: there are always many histories, not just those written by the victors. Imagine the history that must underly Cahokia. We now know that people came from all over to this great complex. What must have been the compelling world view, what must have been the great underlying spiritual beliefs and unifying myths that compelled people to do this? We have so completely lost the history and compelling belief systems that infused such a development. It represents another complete history, having nothing to do with the history of the United States that is at the heart of the history of this continent that we learn and know.


The same can be said of the many cities and towns of the ancient ancestral Puebloans. There were relations between them and the great civilizations of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations. Myths like that of the plummed serpent found both among the Ancestral Puebloan and Mesoamerican. That is a history, a history that was lived, and yet, for the most part, is now lost to us.


But, just as real, just as much a part of human experience as our own history, the history of the European conquest of the Americas and the story of the United States.


History is written by the victors. But there are many histories left unspoken when we focus only on those. Places like Cahokia, places like Chaco Canyon, serve as surviving material reminders of those missing and long forgotten histories.


What must it have been like to visit Cahokia at its height? What must it have been like to be at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, at its height, and a trader in tropical macaws stopped by plying his wares from a great city far to the south in Mexico. A whole civilization, a whole myth shaping world view largely lost to us. Just ruins dotting a desert landscape now, but an echo of a history largely unknown to we, the victors and rulers now.

 

[Kray Gelder]

The European mindset, the driving force of profiteering from the resources of the Americas, destroyed cultures that took thousands of years to develop. This motivation destroyed the forests of the east coast first, producing ship's stores, tar and turpentine, from the pines, ship ribs from the long sweeping oak branches, and masts from the tall straight conifers. Tobacco became another early cash crop, learned from the natives. It was all about exploitation. More money for the Lords and Kings back home. Deer and beaver hides were very important, and an early source of trade with the surviving natives. I can't remember where I read the account of an early female European, within one generation of her arrival in the southeast, in particular, coastal South Carolina. She was traveling through the still virgin forests on native paths, the forests maintained by the natives through the use of fire, the setting park-like. Each native village they came to was unoccupied. The former residents all dead from the diseases brought over. Village after village, vacant.

20 million Native Americans were here when the Spanish arrived. A variety of established civilizations, based upon how their food was produced. Many different, interconnected cultures. The earliest arrivals, got to see it, but it had to go. Taking trumps trading. They didn't have steel, gunpowder, horses or ships. Easy pickings.

Just a ramble, not trying to make any particular point.

 

[uniface]

A joke I heard back in the 1950s (when atomic energy was the hot topic): a tribal elder is asked by a reporter what he thinks about the prospectors swarming over the reservation with geiger counters. He replies,

"First they came for the beaver. When the beaver were gone, they went away.

"Then they came for the gold. When they got all of it they could, they left us in peace again.

"Then they came for the timber. When that was gone too they left, and we thought we were finally rid of them because nothing was left but rocks.

"Now, by gosh, they're back for the rocks !"

 

[newnan man]

Charles Mann in his book 1491 touches on most of these subjects. Good read.

 

[Quartzite Keith]

Charles Mann in his book 1491 touches on most of these subjects. Good read.

Yes, ! highly recommend it as well for anyone that wants to understand the bigger picture. Also his follow-up 1493. But before reading those it is very helpful to have the even broader worldwide perspective very well explained by Jarod Diamond's classic, Guns, Germs and Steel.

 

[malenkai]

Yes, ! highly recommend it as well for anyone that wants to understand the bigger picture. Also his follow-up 1493. But before reading those it is very helpful to have the even broader worldwide perspective very well explained by Jarod Diamond's classic, Guns, Germs and Steel.

Both are excellent, and if you want to go further down this rabbit hole, I highly recommend "They Came Before Columbus" by Ivan Van Sertima

 

[unclemac]

Every people everywhere are "colonizers". Indigenous peoples on every continent and Island group are guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing somewhere in their history. The difference today is that we recognize and condemn it instead of praise and reward it. To truly appreciate history you need to view it through the lense of its time. Thomas Jefferson, a man who fathered children with one of hundreds of his slaves, would not be considered a great man by today's standards. As we move forward it is important that we understand but not condemn our past...and to understand human nature does not change, but that with education and free flow of information we can curb our baser instincts. Say what you want, and we are far from perfect, but we live in a society of folk from every culture, religion, ethnic group and race in the world and the fact that we are NOT living in armed camps fortified against each other says a lot. Native Americans of the time period of Cahokia can't say the same....

 

[unclemac]

don't get me started on Palestine...