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Cahokia was North America's biggest city—then it was completely abandoned. I went there to find out why.
Via Ben Salve
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Rescooped by Skuuppilehdet from HOMEHISTORY |
Scoop.it!
Via Ben Salve
James Piccolino's curator insight,
January 31, 2018 5:54 PM
Why have I never heard of this? This is too interesting to have somehow just passed most of us by. The entire time I was reading this, I was hoping that they would offer an image of what the site looks like today, and luckily they did. As a history lover there has always been something so amazing about being able to compare historical sites in their prime vs what they are like now. I tend to look up locations of historic places after, say watching a tv show based there, for this same reason. To think this all was hidden under an old drive in movie theater, it's a little crazy, but then again that is what makes this sort of thing so interesting.
Zavier Lineberger's curator insight,
February 9, 2018 1:25 PM
(North America) The common view of Native Americans involve nomads and small villages in the north and technologically advanced cities in Mexico. However, the largest Native American settlement was in modern day Illinois. At the time, Cahokia had a greater population than Paris or London and had huge intricate mounds, plazas, agricultural centers, and, most importantly, places of ritual worship. It's amazing how archaeologists can piece together so much of day to day life. Rooms with bones and pottery are discovered to be centuries old feasting rooms, a place with distinct pottery and mats is deemed to be a ritual burning ground. The fact that the workers can tell if objects were imported from other villages or how fast the city was built allows the ancient Americans to communicate with us over 600 hundred years later, especially on their religious beliefs of the Upper and Under Worlds. Not only are the archaeologists able to see daily life, they can see the changing history of the city through different housing patterns further below the soil.
David Stiger's curator insight,
September 6, 2018 8:59 PM
It is a shame that probably not enough residents of the United States are aware that this wondrous city ever existed. People recognize the name "Manchu Picchu" but not Cahokia. Why is that the case in our American culture? The article reports that this city has been under serious excavation since the 1970s. Cahokia is a First Nations example of highly advanced civilization - something that even overtook medieval European civilization when the city was in its prime (1200 BCE). The hegemonic narrative of white, patriarchal supremacy - a view that is characterized as 'Eurocentric' - still dominates our culture and prevents stories like these from impacting and shaping how Americans view history. This is important because Cahokia is further evidence that no European ever introduced civilization to the First Nations. More accurately stated, Europeans introduced a different kind of civilization to the Indigenous Peoples implying a sense of equality and humanness. The resulting genocide of the First Nations by white Americans is even harder to justify and ignore because "savages" do not build magnificent cities based on complex systems of religion, spirituality, politics, and artistic expression.
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