Bull... Woodland, Hopewell and Mississippian cultures engaged in mining copper in Wisconsin. These cultures and earlier Native peoples had also engaged in serious mining of chert- in Ohio's High Ridge, in Illinois and its Mill Creek Chert region along the Mississippi River, and in other places. The pits and tunnels in Illinois and elsewhere are still there and their broken blanks and worn tools have been found throughout which identify the cultures that dug the pits. In the cases of both Chert and copper, select clays and pigments, all these people spent a considerable amount of effort at digging and relocating tons upon tons of material. In building their mounds, the Hopewell, Caddo and Mississippian people moved tons upon tons of selected clays, loess and sand as well. they were NOT merely looking for loose surface copper. This is just more of that 'Indians couldn't have built this or that' tripe from the early days of North American archeology, when it was thought that only whites could build anything. There was a time when archeologists couldn't bear the thought that the moundbuilding cultures that built Cahokia's Monks Mound could have been the same sort of 'lazy, irresponsible' people they knew as 'Indians.' They viewed the native cultures as inferior because by the time they came face-to-face with many of the interior tribes, introduced diseases (courtesey of Hernando DeSoto, perhaps), political turmoil, and pressure from shifting eastern nations had already done the work of destroying or drastically altering most of the interior cultures. In Cahokia's case, the original inhabitants had moved on long before the Illiniwek Cahokias, for whom Cahokia was named, set up house there... but the lithics and evidence doesn't point to any exotic people.
But this is one of the great - I hate to use the word conspiracy, but it certainly is suppressed evidence that American scholars have known about for more than 100 years that there was a huge copper mining enterprise in upper Michigan that lasted from 3,000 B. C. to 1,200 B. C. -
There is no conspiracy, and the Wisconsin copper sites are well known because they are the source for the copper used in the artifacts of the Mississippians and traded throughout the US southeast both raw and copper artifacts such as a copper box turtle found at the Mitchell Site northeast of St. Louis, where a considerable native copper industry had sprung up. Copper artifact making apparently went on at Cahokia. Both sites have areas where artifacts were found (are found) and show large work areas areas where the soil is literally stained by copper oxides, evidence of large amounts of copperwork being done. One such artifact was a sharktooth-effigy club or sword with a handle that had a base made of copper. Many, many items were traded, with copper being but one example. DeSoto reported on the huge size of the canoes used by the riverine peoples- and even by his time they had declined- these were trading cultures of genuine Native American 'redskins' who gathered in items from both the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, from Wisconsin, from the Rockies, from the Appalachians, etc, who wove fabulous textiles without the use of a decent loom, who used copper, stone, antler and shell tools, made microdrills, traded in shark teeth, conchs, fibers, bow wood, textiles, flint blanks, obsidian from the far west, etc. The copper miners were not 'Atlantians' - unless 'Atlantinas' were regular Native Americans like the Natchez.
This article's dates for the copper digs in Wisconsin appear to be way off!
Click here: 'Gods, Graves, Glyphs'
Probe Into Cuba's Possible 'Sunken City' Advances
BY ANDREW CAWTHORNE
HAVANA - (Reuters) - Scientific investigators said on
Friday they hope to better determine later this year if an unusual rock formation deep off
Cuba's coast could be a sunken city from a previously unknown ancient civilization.
``These are extremely peculiar structures ...
They have captured all our imagination,'' Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde said at a conference
after a week on a boat over the site.
``If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time,''
he told reporters later, saying examination of rock samples due to be collected in a few
months should shed further light on the formation off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on Cuba's western tip.
Iturralde, research director of Cuba's Natural History Museum, has joined Canadian
exploration company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) in efforts to solve
the mystery of the smooth, geometrically shaped, granite-like rocks.
They are laid out in structures resembling pyramids, roads and other structures at more
than 2,000 feet in a 7-3/4 mile-square area.
ADC has suggested they might belong to a civilization that colonized the American continent
thousands of years ago, possibly sitting on an island that was sunk to great
depths by cataclysmic earth movement such as an earthquake.
That theory, and its inevitable parallel with the myth of the lost city of Atlantis,
has provoked skepticism from some scientists around the world who say the depth and age -- ADC
has spoken of at least 6,000 years' old -- were not credible.
Some European archaeologists said the stones, stumbled upon in July 2000 while ADC
was hunting with sonar equipment for treasure and sunken Spanish galleons,
could be formed by natural limestone.
But Iturralde's conclusion that there is no immediately apparent natural explanation
for the rocks has lent credence to ADC's theory.
``NEED FOR OPEN MIND''
``It appears like there is some kind of intelligent design in the structure's
configuration and planning,'' ADC's Soviet-born Canadian ocean engineer,
Paulina Zelitsky, said on the sidelines of the geophysical conference in Havana.
``I have worked in this field over 30 years and I have never before seen natural
structures shaped with such intelligent symmetry and plan.
From the very first moment, I was suspecting that these structures were not natural.''
While Iturralde gave evidence in his paper on Friday for seismic movement at the site,
and possible submerging of the land, he drew short of definitively concluding the
rocks were not shaped by nature. If, however, that theory was proven,
it would revolutionize understanding of the history of the Americas, he told reporters.
``It would change a lot our knowledge of humans and the evolution of the Americas,''
Iturralde said.
``Recently, a French archaeologist found some evidence of people being here in South America
40,000 years ago, something we never expect,
so you need to be always open to things that you are not expecting,
that are not in the framework of present-day knowledge ...
We may have found something that nobody has thought about.''
ADC plans to take a specially designed robot to the site in a few months to take samples
of the rocks and the sediment they are embedded in to try to date them and seek
signs they may have once been on dry land.
They will also be searching for any sign of human
life such as drawings, sculptures or artifacts.
``To drill samples from these structures is not easy because they look like granite.
And to drill granite at a depth of 600 meters is very difficult,'' Zelitsky said.
She said their discoveries could make history. ``I think we are talking about the
origins of the American continent.
There are many hypotheses about how the continent was colonized ...
There is quite a controversy, and I think our discovery will be the first
physical evidence of the true origins of developed civilization in the Americas.''
KEWL! I love it when modern archaeology can discover old sites and give us a better picture of things that happened so long ago. It shows how myths can rise up about events that are lost to written history, but are based in truth.
Bookmarking