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Researchers reveal how prehistoric Native Americans of Cahokia made copper artifactsEVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University researchers ditched many of their high-tech tools and turned to large stones, fire and some old-fashioned elbow grease to recreate techniques used by Native American coppersmiths who lived more than 600 years ago. This prehistoric approach to metalworking was part of a metallurgical analysis of copper artifacts left behind by the Mississippians of the Cahokia Mounds, who lived in southeastern Illinois from 700 until 1400 A.D. The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in May. The researchers were able to identify how...

This is the only such artifact found in an excavation by professional archaeologists, but a half dozen or more similar sized sandstone tablets have been discovered near Cahokia. Several were known to have near identical cross-hatching on one side, but were plain on the other. A couple of these have been found in the northern portions of Cahokia and around Horseshoe Lake.

Archaeologists aren't sure why Mississippian Indians engraved small sandstone tablets with birdman images and crosshatching 1,000 years ago. Maybe the tablets were used as visual aids for spiritual storytelling. Maybe they were dipped in dye and stamped on deerskin to create patterns. "Maybe (a tablet) was displayed when you were traveling from one place to another," said Bill Iseminger, assistant site manager at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville. "It was a passport to show your rank or status or authority." Whatever their purpose, the tablets are considered archaeologically significant because they provide rare pictures from an ancient culture....

Contact: Andrea Lynn a-lynn@uiuc.edu 217-333 -2177 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ancient Illinois village unearths lode of questions CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Digging under a blazing sun in an Illinois cornfield, archaeologists this summer unearthed a fascinating anomaly: a 900-year-old square hilltop village. The discovery near Shiloh -- about 15 miles southeast of St. Louis -- challenges previous notions of the area's first people and adds a piece to the puzzle that was Cahokia, a huge "mother culture" that suddenly appeared, and just as suddenly vanished, leaving only traces of its majesty and meaning in the 11th century. Until now, archaeologists...

A Stone Pyramid At Cahokia, Illinois? St. Louis Post-Dispatch Archaeologists have made an astonishing discovery at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site: what appears to be a large stone structure beneath the site's biggest earthen mound. The site was discovered accidentally Jan. 24 during drilling to construct a water-drainage system within Monks Mound, the largest Indian mound north of Mexico and the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the New World. "This is astounding," said William Woods, an archaeologist with Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, who is leading the investigation of the mystery structure. "It's so unexpected that it would never ...

If they ever build a Wal-Mart at Machu Picchu, I will think of Collinsville Road.

Today we travel to southern Illinois, where just across the Mississippi River is located the Cahokia Archaeological Zone. Cahokia was the largest known Native American city north of Mexico. At its peak population around 1250 AD, it was larger that London, England. Of course, Cahokia was not its real name. No one knows its real name. Unlike the ancient towns in the Southeast, where direct descendants of the original occupants still live, no one even knows yet what happened to the population of Cahokia, after it was abandoned. There was an indigenous village in the vicinity of Cahokia as early...

But there is something unique about a particular excavated area beside a rather plain looking mound -- Mound 34 -- that lies about 200 yards east of the world famous and huge Monk's Mound at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. The carefully sifted soil at this excavation has revealed evidence of the only known copper workshop from the Mississippian-era, a culture that peaked about 1250 A.D. throughout the middle and southern portions of America. The overall Illinois state site was the location of a large, prehistoric city of perhaps 20,000 that archaeologists call Cahokia... ...the bits and pieces of the...

COLLINSVILLE -- Human sacrifice! Victims buried alive! Read all about it in "Cahokia -- Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi." According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville. Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead. Based on years of study of artifacts including many from the extensive...

Much still to be learned about Cahokia Mounds By ELIZABETH DONALD, AP COLLINSVILLE, Ill. (Map, News) - It's so much a part of the landscape that metro-east residents often don't even notice it, except when a visiting relative notices: "Look, there's the mound." Rising from what once was an endless grass sea parted by the Mississippi River, Monks Mound isn't even named after the Native American Indians who built it centuries ago, but the Trappist monks who lived there for only five years in the 19th century. No one knows what the long-vanished people who built the mounds called themselves,...

The Lost City of Cahokia Ancient Tribes of the Mississippi Brought to Life By Emmett Berg The city of Cahokia, in modern-day Illinois, had a population of twenty thousand at its pinnacle in the 1300s. With pyramids, mounds, and several large ceremonial areas, Cahokia was the hub of a way of life for millions of Native Americans before the society's decline and devastation by foreign diseases. Representatives from eleven tribes are working alongside archaeologists and anthropologists to assist the Art Institute of Chicago in developing an exhibition that explores artistic and cultural themes of a major branch of pre-Columbian civilization--the...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Thanks in part to new spectroscopic technology, researchers have solved a great mystery concerning some of North America's oldest pieces of sculpture. With the use of PIMA -- a non-invasive Portable Infrared Mineral Analyzer -- an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has identified the source and meaning of "spectacular late prehistoric" figurines found in several locales in the South and the Southeast -- in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee. According to lead researcher Thomas Emerson, an archaeologist and the director of ITARP (Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program), the figurines were...