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For almost as long as we've had civilization, we've lost it. There are records going back hundreds of years of explorers discovering huge temples encrusted with jungle, or giant pits full of treasure that were once grand palaces. Why did people abandon these once-thriving cities, agricultural centers, and trade routes? Often, the answer is unknown. Here are ten great civilizations whose demise remains a mystery. 1. The Maya The Maya are perhaps the classic example of a civilization that was completely lost, its great monuments, cities and roads swallowed up by the central American jungles, and its peoples scattered to...

Excavations at the city, famous for its pre-Columbian mounds, challenge the idea that residents destroyed the city through wood clearing. A thousand years ago, a city rose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near what eventually became the city of St. Louis. Sprawling over miles of rich farms, public plazas and earthen mounds, the city — known today as Cahokia — was a thriving hub of immigrants, lavish feasting and religious ceremony. At its peak in the 1100s, Cahokia housed 20,000 people, greater than contemporaneous Paris. By 1350, Cahokia had largely been abandoned, and why people left the city...

Pity the event planners tasked with managing Cahokia's wildest parties. A thousand years ago, the Mississippian settlement – on a site near the modern US city of St Louis, Missouri – was renowned for bashes that went on for days. Throngs jostled for space on massive plazas. Buzzy, caffeinated drinks passed from hand to hand. Crowds shouted bets as athletes hurled spears and stones. And Cahokians feasted with abandon: burrowing into their ancient waste pits, archaeologists have counted 2,000 deer carcasses from a single, blowout event. The logistics must have been staggering.

Writing in the Journal of Ethnobiology, Natalie Muellert, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, describes how she painstakingly grew and calculated yield estimates for two annual plants that were cultivated in eastern North America for thousands of years—and then abandoned. Growing goosefoot (Chenopodium, sp.) and erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum) together is more productive than growing either one alone, Mueller discovered. Planted in tandem, along with the other known lost crops, they could have fed thousands. Archaeologists found the first evidence of the lost crops in rock shelters in Kentucky and Arkansas in the 1930s. Seed caches and dried...

One ordinary traffic stop in Illinois had an extraordinary ending, when a police officer pulled over a car with expired plates, only to learn the driver had an expired license as well. The law enforcement official learned the man was en route to a job interview, and he had no other way of traveling there. Without hesitation, the officer drove the man to the meeting himself – and the man ultimately landed the position.

A new study shows climate change may have contributed to the decline of Cahokia, a famed prehistoric city near present-day St. Louis. And it involves ancient human poop. Published today [Feb. 25, 2019] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study provides a direct link between changes in Cahokia’s population size as measured through a unique fecal record and environmental data showing evidence of drought and flood. “The way of building population reconstructions usually involves archaeological data, which is separate from the data studied by climate scientists,” explains lead author AJ White, who completed the work as...

Of all the places to discover a lost city, this pleasing little community seems an unlikely candidate. There are no vine-covered temples or impenetrable jungles here — just an old-fashioned downtown, a drug store that serves up root beer floats and rambling houses along shady brick lanes. Yet there’s always been something — something just below the surface.

Lake Sediments Record Climate Change At Cahokia INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA —National Public Radio reports that climatologist Broxton Bird of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and colleagues analyzed layers of calcite crystals interspersed with layers of mud on the bottom of Indiana’s Martin Lake in order to learn about historic rainfall levels at Cahokia. The study suggests that beginning in the 900s, the Central Mississippi Valley received more rain than usual. And carbon isotopes found in skeletons at Mississippian cities indicate that people ate a lot of corn. “That comes at right around 950, and that’s around the time the population at Cahokia...

Located in southern Illinois, eight miles from present-day St Louis, it was probably the largest North American city north of Mexico at that time. It had been built by the Mississippians, a group of Native Americans who occupied much of the present-day south-eastern United States, from the Mississippi river to the shores of the Atlantic. Cahokia was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan city for its time. Yet its history is virtually unknown by most Americans and present-day Illinoisans. ... Its mix of people made Cahokia like an early-day Manhattan, drawing residents from throughout the Mississippian-controlled region: the Natchez, the Pensacola, the...

It was ten stories tall, and wider at the base than the Empire State Building. And nearly a thousand years ago, it was the centerpiece of the continent's largest city north of Mexico. Today, the search to determine how native engineers built Monk's Mound -- North America's biggest prehistoric earthen structure -- has turned up some new and crucial, but very small, clues: the seeds and spores of ancient plants. An aerial view of Monks Mound, the largest prehistoric earthwork in North America. Researchers studying the giant platform mound at the heart of the settlement of Cahokia have studied its...

One thousand years ago, on a floodplain of the Mississippi River near modern-day St. Louis, the massive Native American city known today as Cahokia sprang suddenly into existence. Three hundred years later it was virtually deserted... While analyzing cores from Horseshoe Lake, an oxbow lake that separated from the Mississippi River some 1,700 years ago, Munoz's team discovered a layer of silty clay 19 centimeters (7.5 inches) thick deposited by a massive ancient flood. It's unlikely that the ancient floodwaters were high enough to inundate the ten-story mound at Cahokia's center, a structure now called Monk's Mound... But a flood...

A sprawling city in the heartland of the United States was a cultural melting pot hundreds of years before Europeans ever set foot in North America. A study of dozens of teeth found at Cahokia, an ancient metropolis near modern-day St. Louis, shows that immigrants moved to the city from across the Midwest and perhaps as far away as the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast regions. Cahokia rose to prominence around A.D. 1050, when it underwent what some archaeologists call a cultural Big Bang. "All of a sudden, there's a giant rise in the size of the site," said study...

<p>The scene, discovered by archaeologists in Illinois more than 40 years ago, depicts one of the most extravagant acts of violence ever documented in ancient America: A thousand-year-old pit found under a tall earthen mound, lined from corner to corner with skeletons — 53 in all — neatly arranged two bodies deep, each layer separated by woven fiber mats.</p>

<p>The victims all appeared to be women, mostly in their late teens or early 20s. Evidence suggested they were strangled, or perhaps cut at the throat, at the edge of their shared mass grave, and then interred, meters away from an ornate burial of two men thought to be clan elders, political leaders, spiritual guides, or all three.</p>

Excavations in the Midwest have turned up evidence of a massive ancient fire that likely marked “the beginning of the end” for what was once America’s largest city, archaeologists say.The digs took place in southern Illinois, just meters away from the interstate highways that carve their way through and around modern-day St. Louis. But 900 years ago, this was the heart of Greater Cahokia, a civilization whose trade routes and religious influence stretched from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, and whose culture shaped the lifeways of the Plains and Southern Indians.An artist’s rendering depicts Cahokia’s city center...

CAHOKIA • A Cahokia High School assistant teacher and coach has been charged with having sexual contact with a teenage boy and transmission of HIV. Mario L. Hunt, 35, of the 1900 block of Florence Street in Cahokia, was charged in St. Clair County on Monday with criminal sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual abuse transmission of HIV. The offenses happened with a 17-year-old boy during the first six months of 2011.

live feed............ http://video.foxnews.com/v/1155606214001/

People living 700 to 900 years ago in Cahokia, a massive settlement near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, ritually used a caffeinated brew made from the leaves of a holly tree that grew hundreds of miles away, researchers report. The discovery – made by analyzing plant residues in pottery beakers from Cahokia and its surroundings – is the earliest known use of this “black drink” in North America. It pushes back the date by at least 500 years, and adds to the evidence that a broad cultural and trade network thrived in the Midwest and southeastern U.S....

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.