is pre-columbian america and that means i'm going to talk about american indians i'm going to focus mostly on north america and i'm going to focus in particular on one civilization that i think is really fascinating and maybe many of you have never heard of that's the cahokia civilization that existed about a thousand years ago so first we start with who these native americans or amerindians or indians who they were and where they came from and the first concept i want to introduce is the idea of barangia this was a land bridge connecting siberia to alaska it formed somewhere around 20 000 years ago during the last ice age it was not a glacier we think of the ice age and we think of everything as being covered in ice it was grassland because of just the environmental conditions in that area and so we think that people were able to settle here and then eventually move on into north america and south america and this is kind of a recreation a map of what it would have looked like right the sea levels were lower and so a lot of this that is water now would have been grassland right 20 000 years or so and you see this other map here showing the bridge and then showing the paths some of the paths that we think humans might have taken somewhere around i mean the dates varian there's still lots of argument anywhere between 20 000 years ago and maybe more recently like 13 000 years ago uh we call these people paleo indians uh the first ones to uh cross over into america so we think that a small group of humans maybe 20 000 a few thousand settled in barangia about 20 000 years ago and then at some point and there's just fierce debate there's lots of disagreement at some point like i said either either 16 000 years ago or 11 000 years ago or even there are some outliers who say even way way farther back than that 40 000 years ago that that starts to get really controversial somewhere around 15 000 years ago these humans left barangia and they quickly spread throughout north and south america establishing some of the settlements you see on this map here they came to america chasing or following herds of large animals like deer woolly mammoths mastodons eventually they hunted most of those animals into extinction we know this from archaeological evidence we also know it from linguistic and dna evidence there have been studies linking these people to people who still live in siberia linking their dna and even making linguistic connections between the groups which is very fascinating so so they entered uh like i said you know roughly 15 000 years ago although it's highly debated the first distinct paleo-american or paleo-indian culture is called the clovis culture and it gets that name because distinct tools and arrowheads like you see here were discovered near clovis new mexico and so that name just kind of attached itself and there's a big scientific debate which we don't have to go into but it's fascinating if you are interested in that at first when the clovis uh artifacts were discovered around the 1920s 1930s right about 100 years ago it was widely assumed that these were the first americans these were the first indians who crossed from barangay into america they spread everywhere they spread their culture and that would have been about 13 000 years ago but more studies have found evidence that no people were here before that 16 000 years ago and like i said maybe even earlier and so that has been challenged and now there are all sorts of rival interpretations there's even right here in texas at a place called buttermilk creek there are uh very recently like 2016-2018 there are discoveries of spearheads that are older than this and a different style than this they're 15 000 years old so clearly this early interpretation isn't 100 correct somebody was here even before them uh this map i found and i really like because it's just a great way to visualize really how humans settle the whole planet but obviously we're focusing right now on north america but you can see if you look way over to the left africa 200 000 years ago where we think the first anatomically modern human beings emerge and then you can see all the really neat different uh patterns of how they flowed around the whole world how they settled the whole world the numbers record how many thousands of years ago so we think that the humans emerged 200 000 years ago in africa and then about this says 25 let's say 20 25 000 years ago they settled in the berengia area and then we think we now think sometime around sixteen thousand years ago they were entering north america by fourteen thousand years ago they had reached and settled in south america even more recently they settled in what's now greenland right about 4 000 years ago so you can see the spread in this map and this little dotted line uh shows what the extent of the glaciers were at that time so around 16 000 years ago is when they made it past the glaciers and into north and south america so next you have the next big i mean lots of fascinating things happened but it's not an archaeology class but the next big jump in kind of the history of pre-columbian america is the agricultural revolution so sometime around 5000 bc give or take a few thousand years sometime about 7 000 years ago people began to domesticate and cultivate maize and maize is the technical name for what we often call corn all right uh they domesticated a wild plant called teosinte and in the plant started as just a tiny little one-inch you know a weed with cobs and eventually over thousands of years they got to what we see today and this triggered civilizations in pre-columbian america without the cultivation of maize people would have remained hunters and gatherers and a lot of the things that we associate with highly sophisticated civilizations of mexico like pyramids and writing hieroglyphs would have probably never happened but maize made it possible for population to grow significantly you could now feed a city with thousands of thousands of people because you had a great stable staple crop and it made it possible for societies to become more complex more hierarchical you know with one person growing corn that person could feed a hundred people and free them up to do other things like astronomy and uh religion and war and all sorts of other stuff good and bad so populations grew societies became more complicate complex and we think well the numbers here are highly highly debated and even very controversial but i'll just give you ballpark for ballpark figures some experts estimate that by the time columbus arrived in 1492 there were maybe 40 million people in all of north and south america in central america and maybe 2 million or so in north america those are guesstimates some people think that those numbers are way too low but there's a consensus i think many people think that's kind of a good guess so some of these complex cultures that i mentioned uh the really famous ones are the ones that we're not going to talk about in this class they don't really don't directly relate to us but you've all heard of the aztecs this is a picture of tinotic which is the aztec city that is now mexico city right and you can see a very highly organized city with pyramids and buildings and things like that and that's an artist's imaginative uh imagining of what it might have looked like in 1492 or 1519 when spaniards arrived the mayans you might not be as familiar with them but the mayans were also a very highly complex civilization um they arose a little earlier than the aztecs but were kind of sort of roughly contemporaneous with them there might have been some mayan civilizations still barely holding on when the spaniards arrived but most of the cities like this would have been abandoned this is palenque which is in chiapas which is in mexico and the mayans and the aztecs and earlier groups before them like the old mix they had systems of writing they had uh hieroglyphic systems but also a little bit of syllabaries or where images would stand for sounds they had really complex astronomical studies they chartered you know the movements of the planets and the stars they had so they had a calendar to keep track of those studies the calendar that they had i've often read was more sophisticated more finely tuned than the ones europeans were using at the time so this was really complex stuff they had um they had a ball game which i don't know if this is a reference that works or not it showed up briefly in a door of the explorer episode many years ago some of you might have seen that that episode wasn't 100 accurate because i don't recall anyone getting their heads chopped off but in the real mayan ball game the loser sometimes was sacrificed so i'm glad they didn't show that to my kids but um but they had a fascinating civilization and you can even see echoes of that civilization in north america and i'll show you a little bit of that in a few minutes way down south in peru you may have heard of the inca and machu picchu this is machu picchu it's high up in the mountains you have to climb up into the mountains for like a full day just to reach it uh but it's apparently a really stunning you know uh uh ruins really stunning place they did not have the hieroglyphic system of writing that the mayans and the aztecs did but they did have all sorts of other really fascinating um cultural traits and accomplishments they had a network of trading that was thousands of miles long so it was a really interesting civilization as well but that's about all the time i can afford to spend on those um now let's make shift to pre-columbian north america and the lands that would eventually become part of the united states so in north america there were hundreds of different societies speaking different languages that existed when the europeans made contact i found this map it's an okay map it's not perfect because it's static it gives you the impression if you don't know better that just because it says comanche here and apache here in wichita here in kiowa here that that's the way things were and had always been and in truth the map was always very fluid throughout the recorded history from the 1500s up to the 700s up to the time when they met americans they were constantly moving around sometimes there's a war with one another sometimes because of other reasons so for example the comanche didn't enter this part of the world which is west texas until the early 1700s before that it was the apache and they made war upon the apache and kicked them out and that happens over and over and over again the sioux didn't enter this part of north america until the 1800s right so back when columbus arrived they were probably way down here and we think maybe along the mississippi river so the map is useful but they're not perfect and they can be misleading um so let's talk about some of the different regions and just a little bit of generalities about who some of these interesting tribes interesting peoples were in the southwest you have two or three really interesting groups one i want to say a bit about is the hohokam so these were people who lived in what is now arizona but we think some of their descendants might live throughout the american southwest and even the northern parts of mexico like sonora and chihuahua and they lived in this area from roughly around 81 to maybe 1450 or so and what's really interesting about them is first of all they left uh hundreds of miles of irrigated canals that they used for irrigation so they had a really complex that scholars have found is that they they built some kind of temples and these temples are reminiscent to scholars of the temples that were built in the mayan and aztec civilizations so again another indication that there might have been similar ideas or shared ideas from the american southwest down into what's now mexico another interesting culture is what we call the anasazi that's the popular name for it it comes from the navajo and the navajo word anasazi just meant enemy and that happens to a lot us a lot a lot of times the word that we know a tribe as is the word their neighbors used to call them bad guys or enemy or something like that and then they told us that word oh those are the enemy and we thought that was the real name and so we've been calling them anasazi ever since um there are modern puebloans who sometimes take offense of this and say we should call them the ancestral puebloans instead because they're not really the enemy right unless not anymore um so these are interesting people they lived in the four corners region that's the part where new mexico arizona utah and colorado meet uh here on this map and they constructed uh fascinating cliff dwellings that you can still go today they're parts of national parks pueblo bonito in chaco canyon is one of the most fascinating um it's a complex that in some places is 10 stories high it's gonna be five stories high sorry uh a 10th century city so it was built around the 900s and there's a network of roads about 400 miles along some of them 30 feet wide uh that the people here at chaco canyon left another interesting dwelling is the cliff palace at mesa verde national park this was built in the 1200s and we think that they maybe they built these for defensive purposes maybe they were hiding from somebody maybe they were fearful of an invasion or something of that kind because they built them high up in cliffs and in really inaccessible places place it was hard to reach uh which may have served that kind of a purpose by the end of the 13th century so by the late 1200s some horrific events some cataclysmic event forced the anasazi to abandon these homes and flee maybe towards the rio grande and what's now the el paso area today we don't know exactly what it was some scholars think maybe it was just environmental there was a severe drought and they had to leave because you know there wasn't enough water to to sustain them there are other there are other archaeological finds that are more troubling evidence of cannibalism evidence of massacres um so maybe there was an invasion and they fled from that invasion we don't know for sure but there's some interesting theories now moving on to the peoples of the northwest what's really interesting about the civilizations or the the indian societies in the northwest is that they were very they were they had large populations they were dense populations and they had all of the hierarchy and the social complexity that you associate with an agricultural civilization but they did not have agriculture in other words they didn't have corn yet nevertheless they were able to build a highly populated very dense very sophisticated culture because food was so prevalent abundant there was salmon in the rivers in the northwest uh the region has forests that will have tons of game deer and smaller games squirrels rabbits etc etc so food was so abundant in hunting and gathering and fishing that they were able to sustain a very large population with very complex societies so that makes the pacific northwest kind of interesting um what a little bit about their their society and how was organized uh they had chiefs and the chief ruled over a house or you might call it a clan and this was a kin group a large extended family so the chief would be kind of like the head of the family and they had commenters so other than him lots of just normal people and they had slaves they had slavery and the slaves were usually people who were captured in warfare and then reduced into slavery and they had to do the media work they had to do the grunt jobs like you know carrying water and cleaning the houses and that sort of thing um the chief was usually a man could occasionally be a woman the widow of a former chief and he had to decide things like when to move their salmon fishing operations when to build weirs and traps when to make the first catch how to win and how to perform religious rights and which people to invite to feasts i'll talk about the potlatch feast in just a second so the chief had a lot of responsibilities the chief was usually not it was not in his best interest to be abusive or tyrannical towards the people under his charge under his power for one reason they were his family they were his kin for another reason it was an egalitarian society in the sense that even if i was the chief i needed your cooperation to get anything done right i needed you to agree to build the traps build the houses organize the feasts and so it was a little bit more egalitarian society than it sounds um if you were a slave these aren't slaves this is just a picture of a normal group of people you had few rights you could be treated very badly you could be slain you could be sold away at the owner's whim most house groups or most family groups had at least one slave uh rarely more than a dozen so you didn't have huge plantations with thousands of slaves like you associate with the american past uh in some groups and in some circumstances slaves could improve their lot in life by marrying out of slavery or by becoming so valuable to the group because of the work that they did that they could be kind of adopted into the group so there were some avenues out of slavery it wasn't necessarily internal another interesting thing about the uh pacific northwest was the prevalence of a a custom that you do see in other parts of the world it's certainly not unique to the pacific northwest but this is head flattening and what they would do is they would bind the the newborn to a cradle board in such a way that it would gradually you know shape the baby's head in whatever form they want and they consider this a beautifying process and they consider this something a mark of elite status so if you had a head if your cranium was shaped or malformed through this process and it was kind of conical or whatever the shape was that signified that you were one of the elite you were one of the higher class of the indians the last aspect of the society i want to mention is the potlatch ceremonies and from this we get the modern english word potluck which mason's kind of similar concept so these were big feasts and they could mark special occasions they could march uh mark the building of a new house they could mark a marriage a funeral and things like that they involved the invitation of another house or clan group to come over and share in the feast and usually there was you know just a super abundance of food and there was the expectation that the guests would take whatever food was left over home with them so this was a huge party meant to impress others right you were making them part of your ceremony but you also wanted to impress them with your generosity um guests at these potlatches were given gifts and they were given these gifts in it in accordance with their social rate so this was a highly hierarchical society the highest the chief of the guests would get the first and the best gifts and then work your way on the way down to the commoners and every member of the house every member of the clan was expected to work in preparing these potlatches in the plains you had nomadic hunter-gatherers who followed enormous bison herds on foot and they set fires to stampede the animals over cliffs they use the bison or the buffalo to make items that they use in everyday life like food cups decorations tools clothing etc and they followed the buffalo seasonally so wherever the buffalo went that's where the tribe went they lived in tepees or other you know similar housing structures because they were easy to disassemble and move right so very dramatic livestock uh the first european who described some of the plains indians was francisco vasquez de coronado he was a spanish explorer he was exploring the american southwest from about 1540 to about 1542 he was looking for a legendary city of gold called kevira he never found it all he found was indians living in tipis um one of the groups that he described he called the coercios and that's the group that we now know of as the apaches so he described a group that we know of today he described a lot of features of their culture that we saw in plains indians up to the 1800s the skin buffalo skin tepees a sled called the travel walk it was pulled by dogs sign language the plains indians used their own form of sign language to communicate with each other because there were many different linguistic groups and things like that staple foods like jerky pemmican all of that was described by coronado the last thing this picture illustrates wisely is that the horse was brought to america by the spanish and it revolutionized life in the great plains so pre-columbus pre-coronado pre-spanish there is no horse so everybody followed the buffalo on foot that's why they did things like start fires in order to stampede them to kill them uh it would have been very dangerous to walk up to a buffalo and try to kill it with a knife but with the horse that changed right suddenly they were highly mobile they were much more effective hunters um and groups like the comanche the sioux the cheyenne the crow famous indian tribes that we associate with the great plains [Music] weren't well known at all before the horse arrived and some of them weren't even on the plains they were in other parts of north america the comanche were at the foothills of the rocky mountains probably living as hunters and gatherers the sioux were way off probably along the mississippi river somewhere and there were probably farmers but when the horse arrived these these cultures were transformed and they became cultures that existed on hunting the buffalo another group is the eastern woodlands people this includes algonquian iroquoian muskogee and language families it includes the people that will talk about when the english settlers arrive and they meet squanto and pocahontas and all those famous names the largest political unit among these eastern woodlands tribes was the village usually led by a chief the organization of the culture and society was different depending on the group in the algonquian groups you typically had patrilineal meaning male dominated uh political systems and we see that with i think with pocahontas's tribe her father was the chief of the tribe and men were usually trees to the tribe and the iroquois speaking societies you had a matrilineal kinship system which meant that inheritance and property uh descended through the woman rather than through the husband or the man so you had a very different system of social organization um anyway so that's about that another major group and here's where i really want to spend the most of my time is called the mound builders so the mound builders doesn't refer to a specific group of people it refers to a specific trait or characteristic was that they all created large mounds that served as either burial sites and or temples and we can see this pattern for about a 5 000 year stretch of time in north america especially along the great rivers the mississippi and other uh rivers so the first of the mound builders that we see is at watson break this is in northern louisiana it was built around 3500 bc so that would make it what 5 500 years old and one of the things that's interesting about it the mound was older than the egyptian egyptian pyramids older than stonehenge so the antiquity of it is interesting but also agriculture had not reached louisiana yet it was still down in central mexico it was still kind of getting going and so these were hunter gatherers nevertheless for some reason they built a highly complex site right it was a huge mound and we don't really know how or why this is poverty point this is in northeastern louisiana so not too far away from the first one this was built sometime between 1650 bc and 700 bc and there are several earthworks and mounds that are constructed by that from looking at this map a very extensive trade network through trade the great lakes area was connected to the gulf of mexico um this is a diagram of a platform mound as it would have looked at in some of these villages so it shows multiple layers of mountain construction structures such as temples or mortuaries ramps logs stairs and so forth so the mountain builders left hundreds of mountains and towns the towns usually had large central plazas and they had temples uh the burial structures and the ceremonial structures were usually flat topped and then at the top of that we would have expected to see maybe a dwelling for a priest or a ruler or something like that one type of mound that's really interesting were effigy mounds constructed in animal shapes and this is the biggest and the most impressive of them this is the serpent mound or the great serpent mound in ohio it's one thousand three hundred and thirty feet long it's only about three feet tall and it's only about 20 feet wide and it's quietest i've been there and if you didn't know you might not if you didn't know where you were and what you were looking at you might not recognize it you might be standing right next to it and think oh that's just dango but once you see the aerial photo here then it becomes obvious that this was carefully designed right to look like a serpent and we think so this would be the head of the serpent and so forth and then the tail kind of winding up all the way back here i told you that hernando de soto describes some of these mound building civilizations um he actually observed the people living in these towns with mounds and plazas uh he surmised that many of the towns mounds excuse me served as foundations for priestly in one village near president-elect of georgia georgia he encountered a group ruled by a queen and the queen told him that the mounds in her territory were burial plaza's for nobles and you'll see a specific example of that in just a few seconds so one common use for these mounds would be you know giant tombs right that would be one reason they were constructed here in texas i mentioned briefly caddo mound and you can see that here we believe that this site was uh settled around 800 and then abandoned about 400 500 years later sometime in the 1200s but for four or 500 years there was a mound builder society here a very small one not like the huge ones in cahokia i'm going to show you later but you can still go visit and you can still see the three mountains that these people built um by the time europeans arrived the catalans were still here it's still a recognizable indian tribe it's a federal federally recognized recognized indian tribe uh but they live in oklahoma today and they had given up mound building hundreds of years before europeans arrived but this is a picture of mound a there's a b and c and if i remember right this one was ceremonial so it had some sort of religious or political significance and then the third of them which i don't have a picture of was a burial amount they used it to burial to bury notable people right no high-ranking people uh they live right next to the mounds so they probably lived right next to mound a in tents or teepees and then they used the mound for you know religious observances or something like that probably now the one i want to talk about the most i think is just deeply fascinating is cahokia so around 1810 an american named henry brackenridge came to cahokia it was in what's now southwest illinois it was just across the mississippi river from st louis brackenridge was interested in archaeology and he had heard that cahokia was worth visiting he got there and he says he was struck with a degree of astonishment he saw a stupendous pile of earth vaster than the great pyramid at giza and around it were about a hundred smaller mounds covering an area of five square miles and what he saw and this is maybe a little bit like what what it would have looked like when he was there he saw the largest monks mound the largest mound in north america uh except i mean the largest mound north of mexico city right the largest temple now we've studied it extensively there's still archaeological studies going on to this day we know a little bit more about the place that he visited so cahokia was located is located in present-day southern illinois near st louis missouri it was the largest most important settlement of the mississippian culture it was occupied from about 80 700 or 800 until about 1300. so it was abandoned before de soto before the europeans arrived it's now a state historic site it's called the cahokia mounds state historic site it now contains about 80 mounds originally we think there were about 120. which is sad if you're an archaeologist that means one third of the history has just gone forever we'll never know what was there or what we've lost we call it tokyo because we named it after a nearby indian tribe but we don't actually know who the ancient cahokians were we don't know for sure what tribe they were who their modern descendants are none of that has been verified the cahokia inhabitants had no written language but they did leave symbols on pottery shell copper wood and stone artifacts and they left evidence of elaborate wood hinges mounds and burial sites the city was located where three major rivers intersected the mississippi the missouri and the illinois and because of its proximity to those rivers it was a center of trade cahokia traded with the great lakes with the gulf of mexico it had a network thousands of miles long of trading this uh timeline shows you kind of uh overview of the the settlement so around seven or eight hundred we begin to see woodland projectile points showing a settlement there we see the culture developing by 800 1 000 people before this population explosion and then it jumps from about 1080 ten fifty to about twenty thousand or so ten to twenty thousand uh just fifty years later so by eleven hundred we think there are twenty thousand people are still living there they build some of these major sites that we see and the last building is erected on the summit of monks mound around 11 50 and then about 1200 or so we begin to see it start to decline one thing i just want to stop and point out i showed you pictures of palenque and tenochtitlan the aztec city if you just look at what these artistic recreations of the city look like it looks very similar and it's kind of uh astounding maybe that's just pure coincidence maybe when humans in the ancient world built cities they just always everywhere wanted to build cities with temples and pyramids and so forth or maybe there was some sort of communication maybe they were aware of who the aztecs and mayans were from trade networks and so forth no one really knows but i think it's an intriguing question so the population peaked around 20 000 in ad 1200 and then began to decline um one reason for the decline it might have been an unhealthy place to live an ancient city like this would have been one of the biggest cities in the world at the time but it would have had problems with waste disposal it would have had problems having a steady food supply for so many people for whatever reason it began to decline in the 1200s scholars have suggested other problems may have been over hunting maybe they depleted the local deer and animal food sources maybe deforestation was a problem flooding warfare could have been a problem there is evidence of warfare around 11 75 we see them build these palisades around the central part of the city and the palisades have these kind of guard posts and that suggests that around 1175 they suddenly get worried about their neighbors right they're fearful of being attacked so maybe warfare had something to do with the decline as well um i want to tell you a few more specifics about some of the fascinating things we've discovered about cahokia but just first another note about what we've lost that we'll never find again um the second largest mound a hundred years ago was called powell mound no relation to me whatsoever um but there were a couple of farmers there brothers uh named william and frederick powell they owned the farmland that this mound was on top of it was huge it was 300 feet long so that's like in 180 feet wide so that's that's a football field it was 45 feet high so it's about five stories high four or five stories and by the 1920s archaeologists knew what cahokia was they were interested in studying it and the brothers though they had a farm to run they wanted to you know grow their crops and this mound was just in the way and they wanted to use the dirt to fill in a local a shallow part of their farm well first they offered to let scientists study the mound they said we'll kind of we'll give you permission to study it if you pay us three thousand dollars and you've been studying for three years and the scientists thought that was too much money it was a lot of money in those days uh so that that deal didn't work out the state offered to buy it from them um to buy just the mound and an easement to get to it so they could walk across the the powell's farm to get to it and the powell said no you can buy the whole farm just give us a fair price buy out the whole farm but we don't want to sell just the amount that would be weird that would make mess up our farm and so they couldn't work out an agreement and then the brothers became fearful i don't know how or why but they became fearful that the state was about to use eminent domain to take just take the mound away from them and they didn't want to let that happen so they secretly arranged with some workers to come destroy them so they spent about a week with the steam shovel and they just took all the dirt off the mound and used it to fill in some local shallow areas on other parts of the farm they allowed scientists to watch and to write down to catalog some of what they were seeing during the destruction but basically a week later the mound was lost forever and whatever it could contain we don't know we'll never know um so this is kind of a story about how easy it is to lose things that are scientifically and historically important uh this is a side view of the mount and you can see it's a very bad picture but you can see one of the machines working to tear it down here in this picture we do still have monk's mount monks mound i've mentioned before was the largest man-made earthen mound north of mexico it was constructed with 22 million cubic feet of soil and clay transported in baskets it was built over centuries it started as a very small amount and they just kept building and building and building until they stopped building around 1200 when they were finished it was about 100 feet tall 14 acres big about the same size as the great pyramid of egypt of giz the great pyramid of giza in egypt and even bigger in terms of circumference the size of its base than the pyramid of the sun in mexico city walk on when cahokia was lived in by indians there was a large building on top of the mount and that building was a residence or a temple the city's chief and the chief served a dual role he was kind of the chief of the religion and religious observances as well as a political chief we call it monks mound because long after the indians had abandoned the site french missionaries came in and they built a chapel on the west end of the mound and so it got named after trappist monks who eventually lived in that chapel we've learned a lot by studying uh cahokian sites and studying other mississippian sites related to cahokia that had trade with cahokia one of the things we've learned about is a game that was really really popular during this time called chunky and this statue shows us a chunky player so this is an indian and this is the disc that's an important part of the chunky game in his right hand so the game originated around 600 a.d and it involved rolling the stone disc and throwing spears at it and audiences gambled on the outcome so i guess the idea was you rolled the disc and then after it traveled a certain point you would have a contest to see who could who could hit the disc with a spear or get as close to it as possible and people would bet their entire fortunes uh on the outcome so this chunky player statute was um was made we think at or near cahokia mountains but it was discovered in oklahoma so someone made it in cahokia and then it traveled to oklahoma via trade routes another interesting aspect of cahokia is woodhenge this was a ceremonial circle of upright wooden posts first constructed around ad950 four of the posts show the cardinal locations of north south east and west the eastern and western posts marked the position of the equinox sunrise and sunsets four other posts were at the positions of the sunrise and sunset during the summer solstice and the winter solstice so this was basically stonehenge if you've seen pictures of stonehenge in england this was very similar except it's made out of wood but they both served a key purpose an astronomical purpose of serving as calendars they were useful for observing the movements of the sun and the moon and maybe even the stars there is evidence of human sacrifice at cahokia mound 72 contained several burial mounds and platform mounds and at first these mounds were used for the burials of elite people about 272 individuals were buried in mound 72 over a 100 year period and over half were the victims of ritual sacrifice some of those victims 24 women were sacrificed and buried in a rectangular pit in the southeast corner of the mound four young men perhaps representing the four cardinal directions were buried without their hands or heads on a small platform near a southeastern ramp up the mound next to those young men there was a pit found that contained the remains of 53 young women they had been sacrificed and then laid in rows and that's what this image is showing you possibly how the woman is about to be sacrificed and the bodies are laid out in a neat row for some religious purpose i'm not sure what 39 men and women were violently killed and buried in a pit nearby uh some were decapitate decapitated some were killed by arrows some had fractured skulls some were buried alive and then on top of them we found that they found the bodies of 15 elite individuals perhaps this was one of those mass sacrifices where they were meant to be servants for the elite people who were buried later uh servants of an afterlife we don't really know one of the more interesting finds in cahokia is this the birdman burial or beaded berry it was found in mountain 72 they found the body of a probably an elite status male who was placed on a bed of 20 000 marine shell disc beats arranged in the shape of a falcon with the bird's head underneath and beside the man's head and its wings and tail beneath his arms and legs he was buried with several of his servants so they were sacrificed and buried with him and with chunky stones and spears and trade goods from throughout the area so this seems to have been one of those things where the servants were meant to accompany him to the afterlife and they expected him to go hunting with his spears and to play chunky and have a good time uh this motif the falcon warrior or birdman motif is seen at other sites in cahokia and the mississippi culture as as seen by the sandstone tablet this is just one example of the birdman motif this was found uh on the east side of monk's mound in excavations about 50 years there are many fascinating figurines that survive from the cookia civilization this is probably my favorite it's called the berger figurine it was made around ad 1100 and it was discovered near cahokia and it shows a kneeling woman wearing a pack on her back you can see her kneeling here and the pack you can see kind of up there and using a hoe to till the back of a serpent on which she is squatting so you can see in these pictures the hoe is in her right hand the serpent is down here and she's kneeling on it and tilling it as if it were the earth and this probably recreates some sort of you know mythological story some sort of religious story in the cahokia civilization the tale of the serpent splits and transforms into gourd flowers vines and fruit so this serpent is thought to be associated with the underworld or death and to represent the fertility of the earth and the woman the figure may be an image of the earth mother or corn mother who was a typical figure in indian mythology the color figurine shows a woman with long straight hair she has a slight cranial deformation so she's had the skull transformed um the platform that she's sitting on is divided by sections and covered with striations that are thought to represent ears of corn and her hands rest on a box-like object which might be a basket a maze stalk or cornstalk rises on the right side of the basket can't really see it in these pictures maybe over here over here and through the right hand and along the arm and around the back of the figure's head and this figurine figurine is also like the merger one thought to represent the connection of vegetation and fertility female deities like the corn mother and the earth this is called the lucifer pipe that was discovered in oklahoma at a mound in spiro oklahoma and the hole in the back of the head is meant for the insertion of a tube so it can be used to smoke tobacco the resting warrior or big boy pipe this might represent another native american mythological feature called a figure called red horn but he sits cross-legged he has his hands on his knees he has a cape of feathers on his back he has uh earrings a string of beads around his neck and strapped to his head you can see that kind of here is a sacred bundle so it's like sacred objects objects that are sacred to him that are inside the bundle strapped to his head so the hair is done up in a bun with a long braid over the left shoulder and like i said many archaeologists think that this is a mythological figure the conquering warrior pipe one of my favorites this shows a more brutal side of the culture so this figure is a warrior and he's in ritual regalia he's leaning over it's hard for you to see but he is leaning over a crouching victim and either hitting him in the face or i think is more likely if you look at this part down here it looks like he's decapitating him so he's cutting the head off a sacrificial victim so this is obviously an image of conquest and human sacrifice i think a couple of other things related to all of this um i've talked a lot about studying archaeology and that sort of thing about 30 years ago or so the native american graves protection and repatriation act was passed and it was passed because over the 1800s and early 1900s museums universities federal agencies had acquired the remains of thousands of indian peoples something like 14 or 15 000 indian skeletons or indian remains or in the hands of federal agencies universities museums and so forth women like this person maria pearson were outraged by that she apparently had a meeting with the governor of iowa in the 1970s he asked her what she he could do for indian peoples or something to that effect and she said you can give me back my people's bones and you can quit digging them up and she was influential in getting iowa to pass an early version a 1976 version of this act requiring universities government agencies to return these bones to the tribes that they belong to a scandal in 1987 led to the federal nagpra law this is slack farm kentucky over a few days about 10 people destroyed 650 indian graves and other artifacts this was a farm that contained a known archaeological site they knew it was there was an indian uh settlement there they knew it was about a thousand years old or so these 10 people basically wanted to dig for arctic artifacts itself they wanted to make a buck and so they paid the owner of the farm they got permission to do whatever they wanted to for about 10 days they went in with tractors and they destroyed hundreds of thousands of items right because they just had no respect whatsoever for the science of it much less the you know regard for the feelings of the indians who lived nearby and might have been related to uh to these people so there was a huge outcry there was a lot of controversy over the destruction that was done to these indian graves and to the artifacts and that helped move for the native american graves protection and repatriation act to be passed in 1990. so nowadays federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding are required to return native american cultural items including human remains and sacred objects to lineal descendants or culturally affiliated indian tribes and it's illegal to traffic in native american human remains or cultural items here you see a picture of the saginaw chippewa indian tribe of michigan they're holding a re-burial ceremony for human remains that were returned to them in 2014 by the university of michigan