A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region’s tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.
[…]
Centuries later, Cahokia’s meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery. It was booming in 1050, and by 1400 its population had disappeared, leaving behind a landscape completely geoengineered by human hands. Looking for clues about its history, archaeologists dig through the thick, wet, stubborn clay that Cahokians once used to construct their mounds. Buried beneath just a few feet of earth are millennia-old building foundations, trash pits, the cryptic remains of public rituals, and in some places, even, graves.
To find out what happened to Cahokia, I joined an archaeological dig there in July. It was led by two archaeologists who specialize in Cahokian history, Sarah Baires of Eastern Connecticut State University and Melissa Baltus of University of Toledo. They were assisted by Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Watts of Indiana University, Bloomington, and a class of tireless undergraduates with the Institute for Field Research. Together, they spent the summer opening three large trenches in what they thought would be a sleepy little residential neighborhood southwest of Monk’s Mound.
Fascinating. I had no idea native Americans built huge cities like this far north of – roughly – the current border between the US and Mexico.
That it was there is pretty common knowledge, i learned it in primarary school here in Europe.
BUT, the real question we all are wondering about; “What operating system did this city use for design, which one for schools and for the home and so on?”
Now that is some irony. I didn’t hear about it until I was long out of school, and I’m from the states. Then again, the schools here don’t really think native culture is relevant anyway, though they do talk up ancient Egypt a great deal. Odd, that.
Depends on the schools. In contrast to many other countries school curriculum are often city by city or even classroom by classroom. We did learn about Cahokia. I was fascinated enough by it to stop by on a road trip. I’ve seen other smaller mounds built by the same peoples. Cahokia is so big its actually less impressive on first glance. Its not as obvious what you’re looking at was crated by man.
I’m from about 100 miles north of Cahokia. I went on a field trip to visit the museum during elementary school. History education (all education in the united states) varies greatly from school to school (sometimes inside the school from teacher to teacher). Some friends from different schools had never heard of Cahokia Mounds into their 20s.
Arch Linux?
But how did they… mound their drives?
Apple III’s
I believe they used Human.
Well the 68000 wasn’t released at the time so it couldn’t be Human68k (as used for the x68000 computer), perhaps HumanBronze or something? HumanWood?
Megol,
Some people thought HumanBronze was innovative, but others thought it was overrated. They started with HumanWood, took a jack off, and then left it in the sun for a while.
…too crude for osnews?
Edited 2016-12-16 02:05 UTC
judgen,
When our civilization disappears and is rediscovered by future archeologists, what will be the correct answer to these questions?
In 5000 years time, will our period be significant? Or will it just be drowned out with the passage of time? We have troves of multimedia, which is something quite novel for humanity. Assuming it survives and remains playable, I think centuries of media will tend to become a blur, although I would think people will always be curious to see the early recordings because that in and of itself makes them special. Much like our fascination with the founding fathers yet widespread disinterest with subsequent generations.
Likewise we’re fascinated with the downfall of things and that will likely make the footnotes of history. But generations between now and then will have a hard time being remembered for anything we do. We’ll probably be generalized much like we’ve generalized ancient cultures throughout history.
It would be interesting to be able to follow a single person’s story line from arbitrary points in history. Theoretically all of our online/digital/website profiles could allow future historians to really dig into the lifestyles and feelings of normal individuals rather than just the famous people who get all the attention. But it’s uncertain whether our data, which is held by both individuals and corporations and even our own Thom, will survive in any form. Perhaps it’s too vein to even think this would be all that important.
If you like history, you are aware that the periods we study are the ones on which remarkable changes happened, so it is what happened an not when happened, true for science, true for anything else, even literature. Our period is already tainted by many horrible wars (2 of them global), first trips to space and because of the rise of computers and automation. They will, probably, think how primitive our techniques were or will not think about it at all (hope our hyper-uber-intelligent machines will be kind to our descendants
).
Now, at least for me, following the life of any particular person is kind of waste of time, what matters more is what he did or said. We have a very limited time and it keeps running out way faster than we would like, we must enjoy the journey while we can.
. Also, when seen from close up, many people we had a kind of admiration gets really ugly. :p
About keeping the data of our life, instead of just our most prominent contributions, well, as hard as it can be, lets face it, we all will die, is there any more value on wondering about what someone on a distant future will think about us instead of concentrating on improving the image we have for people around us? I don´t think so.
acobar,
You are thinking of it in terms of vanity, but to me it’s more about curiosity than anything else. It’s just my personal opinion though, and I realize some of us don’t care at all about what ancient people thought.
Edited 2016-12-15 20:46 UTC
Perhaps I should have written better elaborated lines. It is not that I don´t care for what they thought, but that I am curious about the general aspects of their life and not of a particular individual. For example, I did read a lot about ancient civilizations “science”, construction techniques, their production system, transport and organization as a society, it is a very interesting thing because societies and knowledge, as a whole, have changed a lot. Humans, not so much, have you read Iliad and Odyssey you will easily identify all primordial aspects of human beings “souls” of today but you would grasp little about how our societies work and know now. By the way, I´m fascinated by Greek philosophy and how their thoughts about perfection impacted, on this case negatively, their development of math.
acobar,
The only thing is I’m uneasy with generalizations. History can be very selective and even today plenty of individuals won’t fit the molds attributed to them. So I like the idea of having something more personal and individualistic, if only to make a human connection through time.
Edited 2016-12-16 00:54 UTC
On this note, one civilization that seems to have recorded everything was the Sumerians. So we have a fairly decent grasp of how their day to day lives were, since they recorded things such as contracts of land purchases, farming, property disputes, etc. Their society was very much like our own western one.
Problem with a lot of our theories about ancient people is that we tend to describe religious reasons for things we don’t understand.
leech,
Haha, it would be ironic then that we believe they used gods to fill their knowledge gaps, while we’re also using gods to fill our own knowledge gaps about them.
It’s one reason I’d like to know more about the individuals. How many would have actually been non-practicing atheists?
Like I said, when you dive inside individual´s life you will see the darkness inside us. Obviously, I´m not talking about Anne Frank, she was “just” a smart girl full of life and hope trapped in a dark period of our history, and is really painful to follow the succession of events that lead to her demise. The particularities change, but the pattern is recognizable on very different life lines: Aleppo, Iraq, Srebrenica, Gaza, the list goes on. That is why I brought the human “soul” to light, the history develops similar lines because we stayed close to our roots instead of trying to free us from it, perhaps, it is impossible to us. All these tragic events bring important lessons, lessons we didn´t learn and part of the problem, at least to my eyes, is that we insist on trying to relate to particular actors or groups instead of paying attention to the pattern. Misery around us and we feel sorry “only” (in the sense that we don´t pay too much attention) for characters far away in space and/or time. Being pragmatic, we can only act now and hope our actions will bring a better future.
I´m not saying that it is not important to read about individuals, they can help us understand ours and others struggles, but that learn lessons as a society is way more important, seeing how powerful impacts it has on ours life ultimately.
There is a culture of individualism on full force going on, it is a useful discourse for those in power as they use it to justify many things and, more likely than not, try to rewrite history from individuals or groups interests. Like you, I am totally against it, true colors and emphases on what makes us similar should be our main concern. I´m atheist and see each life as unique, precious and without second chances, does not matter if it has similarities with some other, when it is gone it better should has been enjoyed.
It all sounds contradictory, but is not, really.
Edited 2016-12-16 07:17 UTC
Assuming our civilisation ends is to assume our digital multimedia also will become unreadable. The 1990s will appear as the beginning of the dark ages, when writing was forgotten.
No it isnt,
Is this strictly true? What about the time capsules that are deliberately stashed to be read in the future? Obviously existing time capsules predate the digital age (but I still think they’re awesome!)
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/01/13/220-year-old-time-capsule…
The voyager spacecraft contained a small amount of data in 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
There was a proposed time capsule to become an earth satellite for some 50k years. It included instructions for decoding the data. Every person on earth was allowed to submit something personal.
http://www.keo.org/uk/pages/faq.html
How awesome would it be to discover such a capsule from ancient history? Wow…
Edit:
I didn’t realize the original creator of KEO passed away:
http://www.keo.org/necro/necro_UK.html
They still want to do it, but it’s unclear that they have the resources to make it happen.
Edited 2016-12-17 02:50 UTC
Just a correction for you, it is in the midwest far from the mexican border. It is up by St.Louis.
That’s what I meant. I should probably rephrase it to make it clearer.
Does anyone else think it’s funny that the US Mid-West is actually Mid-East?
I think we should change the names to actually fit the region.
Well, things move slowly in geography. It used to be just known as the west. I think it makes more sense to just call it by a more predominant geological feature – The Great Lakes.
How can you say this when Earth zips through the space at 29,800 m/s (median) and our axial velocity is (close to equator) alone about 465 m/s ? I would say the opposite.
Geo means erosion and graphy means writing/drawing. So technically the space travel of the earth is insignificant for that particular field.
Geo means Earth or things related to Earth and Geography means way more than what you said and even if Cosmology is not one of its main concerns it is used to establish many important aspects of Geography. Be aware of our motion is clearly important. Anyway, I should have said tangential velocity but, alas, inexactitudes is my second name.
Not really. Midwest fits it since everything is measured from the East Coast (Washington DC) in the US.
Midwest means it’s west of the Appalachian mountain range, east of the Rocky Mountains, and north of the Southern stats.
There is a lot of disagreement on the topic as to what states are really in the midwest.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/what-states-are-in-the-midwest/
Luckily most agree on Illinois, for our discussion.
Yeah, I disagree on North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas being classified as midwest, but I can’t really dispute it given the demographics of the settlers.
My point is the Great Plains is where the west really starts.
I think this is important for indigenous people worldwide.
They are excavating a major city from 900 AD in the middle of america. Every day they learn more about it and the people who built it.
This is important b/c it’s 500 years before Europeans ‘discovered’ america, and it’s more impressive than what they had back home in many ways.
It appears this town in what is now modern east St. Louis it was bigger than London and Paris of the time.
It formed quickly, had all the signs of prosperity and then drama, and within a few hundreds years was gone again.
But it shoots a huge hole in the concept of who’s civilized. Eurocentric teaching always places the ‘native’ in the ‘savage’ or ‘simple’ category, forever transformed by the ‘progress’ the europeans represent.
Major american indian cities during the european dark ages? Throws a whole different perspective on things, doesn’t it?
The Cleveland Indians should change their name!
I grew up near the area. Monks Mound is pretty cool. The museum is fairly small. There’s a garbage dump on the other side of interstate 55, which is often confused by visitors as Monks Mound.
http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/columns/joe-holleman/spotlight-l…
We were there last May. There’s a new museum building. Interesting site.
And while Cahokia was, as far as we know now, the largest “urban” center, smaller Mississippian sites cover the Mississippi, Ohio, Savannah, and Tennessee valleys. Hereditary chiefdoms, stratified or ranked societies, expansive trade networks from Wyoming to the Gulf Coast and Mexico, richly-developed ideologies around warfare, cultivation, sport… amazing the societal and creative energies a dependable food source (maize agriculture, in this case) can do.
Oh, and Cahokia wasn’t the first instance of monumental architecture north of Mexcio. Check out Poverty Point, in Louisiana, predates Cahokia by a couple thousand years: https://www.nps.gov/popo/index.htm
I am going to have to fly over this stuff in Google Earth VR when I get some time.
It’s interesting how different areas emphasize different Native American cultures. I grew up on the plains close-ish to New Mexico, and all the Native American stuff history I was exposed to was about the Native Americans who lived on the Great Plains with some tangents about the Pueblos and Anasazi in New Mexico.
The Five Civilized Tribes were mentioned, but they were mentioned just in passing and in connection with Thanksgiving and Andrew Jackson.
Is this OSnews or National Geographic? Let’s keep on point shall we?
a city is an operating system.
You could provide articles and/or links to interesting OS developments if you want. However there’s not much really interesting stuff happening in the area and for generic updates of Linux development there are better sites…
I drive by this everyday on way to work. Ironically people from outside of the area mistake the huge landfill that completely dwarfs it about a 1/4 mile down the interstate from it.
<a product of US public schools, circa 1980’s>
I always thought context was lost when they taught us history of ancient civilizations. We learned about various ancient societies (greek, roman, mayan, american, nordic) but they didn’t do a good job of comparing them, or providing the contextual links for our modern times.
I always felt the teacher was implying that these were the only great societies that we have record of, and that the rest of the globe was backwards and stupid at that moment in time. I used to constantly raise my hand and ask “yeah but what were the ___ doing during this time?”
My belief is that the eurocentric history lessons we teach in american schools always show the white/europeans as more advanced than others. We highlight and brag about their historical accomplishments while ignoring others. We say things like “the ancient persians invented algebra and a written code of law” but it’s not discussed further. We don’t try to impress the kids with their ancient intellect like we do the greeks, romans, english. etc..
For instance – Persia/Iran/Iraq. Americans are taught very little about this. When we do learn about the history of that region it is called Mesopotamia, great things are attributed to it, then we are asked ‘what happened’ to imply that they are no longer a great society. Just a total whitewash of the region. We learn nothing about the drawn borders, the 1919 Paris accord, Israel, etc..
Don’t get me started on what they (don’t) teach about africa, leaving most americans referring to it as ‘the dark continent’ where nothing but spear chuckers live.
Mostly right for us as well, though we did get bombarded with Israel this and Israel that. All in the context of post World War II, of course, and how awesome it was that we helped the Jews. They hated me in class because I always asked what right we thought we had to kick the people who were already there out and how that was any different than what we did to the Native Americans. That… did not go over well with most teachers save one who actually made it a point to teach his curriculum of history as accurately as he possibly could, nastiness and all. That was the only cool history class I had through K-12.
darknexus,
Look at the map and see how much of the palestinian state the israeli occupation has taken over, it’s alarming. It’s almost all gone. David Friedman, the new ambassador appointed by Trump, wants to throw out the two state solution and wants israel to take even more land including jerusalem.
The west is so indoctrinated with hatred of muslims that we keep sending billions each year in military aid for israel to fight them. Yet we’re such hypocrites when we blame muslims for the violence there, as if we wouldn’t be raising all kinds of violence ourselves faced with an all-powerful military force taking away our land. Many of the very same people who express their hatred of muslims here would be be following the exact same course of action if it was happening to them.
Edited 2016-12-16 22:46 UTC