New discoveries about 'sophisticated' Native American tribe that mysteriously vanished nearly 600 years ago unearthed in Illinois
A sprawling Native American city stretching six square-miles and home to roughly 20,000 people disappeared from the Mississippi river valley over 600 years ago.
And while the 'Cahokia' tribe mysteriously vanished, archaeologists have uncovered artifacts from the society that could provide clues about the group - their culture, language, and even their downfall are still lost to history.
The team university researchers recently discovered pottery, tools, like 'micro-drills,' and wall trenches at the Illinois site, dating back approximately 900 years.
Wood particles were also analyzed at the site as experts hypothesize the people cut down forests, which degraded the oil and may have caused flooding - an event that could have led to the tribe abandoning the city.
The excavation is being conducted by students from Saint Louis University (SLU) and neighboring colleges, who are working toward a career in archaeology.
Students dug out rectangular holes at the site, carefully shaving out dirt to uncover new discoveries.
Mary Vermilion, associate professor and archaeology at SLU, told 5OnYourSide: 'The structures that we're finding here and the pottery that we're finding here seem to date to the Sterling Phase of the Mississippian Period — which is approximately 1100 AD to 1200 AD — which is a critical point in the development of the chiefdom because it's like the apex.'
The finds join hundreds of other sophisticated tools previously uncovered at the site, including shells and beads that had been precision drilled for what scholars believe was a unit of currency.
Distinct from the Maya or Aztec people to the south, the Cahokia emerged in the Mississippi Valley over a thousand years ago, around 700 AD — in what is now the state of Illinois, across the river from present day St. Louis, Missouri.
At their apex, this indigenous civilization had constructed an estimated 120 earthen mounds: the largest city north of Mexico prior to the arrival of European settlers.
Many of the mounds might be better described as great pyramids, cornered square at the bottom and smoothed level at their highest points.
Anthropologists believe these mounds, including the lost city's largest, the 100-foot Monk Mound, that served as high ground to elevate, honor and protect homes of the Cahokia's civic leaders.
But by 1350 the society that build these impressive structures vanished without explanation, just about a century before Columbus sailed into the Americas.
In addition to searching for artifacts, the SLU researchers teamed up with the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to map a key Cahokia site via a 'Light Detection and Ranging' (LiDAR) aerial drone - just like tech used in the spy agency's official work.
'The best part was applying our tradecraft in a way that is not the norm for us,' one agency analyst put it, 'in this case it was archaeology.'
'You can't really even walk through some of that part,' as the intelligence agency's drone program manager, Philip 'Casey' Shanks, noted.
'That's why the UAS is the right tool for the job,' said Shanks, who works our of the agency's Office of Geomatics.
The collaborative Cahokia Mounds aerial survey conducted flybys over more than 490 acres of the site, the largest single area that this air-based US spy agency has ever surveyed via drone with LiDAR technology.
LiDAR is a remote sensing tech that can measure the distances and contours of surfaces by beaming a laser at its target and analyzing the light reflected back.
The data collected was then used to build a photogrammetric 3D foundational mesh model of the ancient city's major landmark, the Monks Mound.
'There are a lot of questions about Cahokia's past that can be answered by remote sensing and LiDAR data,' said Justin Vilbig, a geospatial data scientist at the Taylor Geospatial Institute and the doctoral student at SLU leading the project.
'This gives the full landscape – where features were in context with each other – and what were the priorities of the Cahokians,' Vilbig said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13556203/New-discoveries-Native-American-Illinois.html