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08/07/2009: "All civilizations die the same way"
As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat's cautious but mesmerizing new book, "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi," makes clear, Cahokia -- the greatest Native American city north of Mexico -- definitely belongs to human history. At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland.
Well into the 19th century, many white Americans refused to believe that the "savages" they encountered in their ruthless drive across the continent could have built the impressive mounds or earthen pyramids found at numerous places in the Midwest and Southeast. Cahokia is by far the biggest such site, but by no means the first. There are several mound complexes in the Deep South that predate the time of Christ, and one in Louisiana has been dated to 3,400 B.C., well before the building of the Egyptian or Maya pyramids.
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This led to the idea that some ancient, superior "Mound Builder" civilization -- variously proposed to be Viking, Greek, Chinese or Israelite in origin -- had originally settled the continent before being overrun by the wild and warlike American Indians.
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He seems on firmer intuitive ground in suggesting that outlying agrarian villages, whose populations were ethnically and culturally distinctive, much poorer than Cahokians and predominantly female, may have provided the Cahokia elite with sacrificial victims.
[ The answer stares him in the face: the Cahokians were a higher version of the tribes found today, who were created when the elites got overwhelmed by their slave populations, which is why the new population didn't build great cities like Cahokia. The article does a lot of hand-waving about human sacrifice to obscure this fact. ]
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/08/06/cahokia/index1.html