Why did cahokia disappear

Website: meilansolly. One of the more than earthen mounds preserved at the Mounds State Historic Site Getty Images At its peak around the turn of the first millennium, Cahokia , a city in what is now Illinois, was home to as many as 20, people.

Archaeologist Caitlin Rankin conducts excavations at Cahokia. Post a Comment. While the extent of it is debated, it appears the Mississippians may have conducted ritual human sacrifices, judging by what appears to be hundreds of people, mostly young women, buried in these mass graves.

Some were likely strangled; others possibly died of bloodletting. Four men were found with their heads and hands cut off; another burial pit had mostly males who had been clubbed to death. The people of Cahokia themselves may have both doled out and received a lot of this violence, since researchers have found no specific evidence of warfare or invasion from outsiders.

Emerson says he has excavated other Native American sites that were filled with arrowheads left behind by war; by comparison, at Cahokia there were almost none. But William Iseminger, archaeologist and assistant manager at Cahokia Mounds , points out there must have been some continuing threat to the city, whether from local or distant sources, that necessitated it being built and rebuilt four times between and After reaching its population height in about , the population shrinks and then vanishes by Whatever, the Mississippians simply walked away and Cahokia gradually was abandoned.

The US National Park Service is considering whether to take the area and nearby surviving mounds under its wing. Federal designation could bring Cahokia additional recognition and tourism.

Currently about , people visit the site every year; by comparison, the rather more modern, Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch in St Louis attracts four million visitors annually. F ollow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join in the discussion. But in a new paper, White and his colleagues looked for evidence for a significant human presence in the centuries after the famous abandonment.

As it turns out, after the Mississippians left someone else moved in. The researchers looked to sediment cores taken from the area, in search of a compound found in human feces. Long-lasting molecules called fecal stanols are made by the bacteria in human guts as a by-product of digesting cholesterol.

As the researchers look back through the sediment layers, they can measure stanols to get a sense of how many people lived in the area over time. The new evidence suggests the population at the site rebounded by , peaked again in , and declined once more by about The researchers think the new arrivals were from the Illinois Confederation — they weren't Mississippians. This new group of indigenous people had a slightly different way of life, supplementing some agriculture with more focus on bison hunting.

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