Human sacrifice! Archaeologist creates stir with new book on Cahokia Mounds

BND ^ | 9 Aug 2009 | GEORGE PAWLACZYK

[stripes1776]

this pill bill

Clever name. I have to remember that.

That’s when the cost savings will really kick in!

LOL

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

I always pictured migrating bands of tribes back then in America not a big city.

There were a few migrating bands of tribes but they were the minority. The majority were farmers who did some hunting.

There were several cities in North America but it was mostly large villages on the East Coast.

Lacking large domestic animals for protein large cities were mostly not practical.

[DJtex]

The Mound Builders had a sophisticated civilization including ceramics and other high artwork. The very earliest European explorers brought diseases that largely wiped out most of the Indians long before settlers arrived. Even the accounts from Plymouth Rock talk about the Pilgrims raiding the food stores of empty Indian villages that had recently been depopulated by European disease.

So most settlers did only encounter roving bands of Indians.

[PIF]

I could be wrong here but a small town of 20000 by 1150 A.D. was not much to get excited about, considering the large cities that existed in various places and times B.C. throughout South and Central America. There is a pyramid in SA (Peru?) that is not only much older, but much larger than the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt.

[BGHater]

Artist's conception of Cahokia's central plaza, circa 1150.

Errata:

Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi-Salon Article

Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond-'Collapse' Dude, not on Cahokia, but on society today

[SunkenCiv]

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[Claud]

Interesting. This actually should lead to some interesting connections with the ethnology of the Eastern Woodland tribes.

The Iroquoian tribes seem to have borrowed a few elements from the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Read the accounts of the 1600s and you see that they were very ceremonial about their torture and cannibalizing of enemies—generally doing so on a platform and making an effort to keep the victim alive until dawn, perhaps as a sacrifice to the sun.

There definitely seems to be some religious thread that is underlying the whole Southeastern Ceremonial Complex.

[SunkenCiv]

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Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi Timothy R. Pauketat Kindle edition Pauketat search

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[Moonman62]

"These female sacrifices might not have been of unimportant people. This may have been a very honored role to fill. It may have been people who were impersonating some kind of corn goddess," he said, "And their duty was to die."

Either that or they wouldn't stop nagging the men. (You love that mound more than you love me, etc., etc.)

[Antoninus]

The Iroquoian tribes seem to have borrowed a few elements from the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Read the accounts of the 1600s and you see that they were very ceremonial about their torture and cannibalizing of enemies—generally doing so on a platform and making an effort to keep the victim alive until dawn, perhaps as a sacrifice to the sun.

I am really going to eat some Iroquois today!