I visited the Cahokia capital city on the east bank of the Mississippi recently. The museum is well funded, excellent dioramas and outstanding collections of artifacts.
The site includes dozens of tall mounds including the major central mound around 90 ft. tall. It looks like the Aztec pyramids I saw in Eastern Guatemala.
The site was nearly empty on a Sunday morning. It could have been crowded with a little honesty about the archaeology of the site. The top of the main mound was used to sacrifice young virgins. We know this because the mound (#72) is the mound of honored burial that includes the powerful dignitaries AND hundreds of young girls.
I know that the girls were virgins whose hearts were removed while they were still alive because all the artwork in clay, copper and stone have the same graphics as the Aztec. To me, and most people with a brain, that means the culture and religion were the same. The gods were the same and they wanted living virgins. A little Islamic, don’t you think.
So why isn’t this aspect of Cahokia a prominent public fact? Heart removal of virgins in the heartland of America? My daughter, the archaeologist-anthropologist, says that publicizing that aspect of Cahokia would be strongly opposed by local tribes. We are so politically correct.
The connection to the Aztecs is also omitted. For no obvious reason. Again, one would have to be blind to miss the myriad identical features.
The most important omission from my perspective is the Lefty-Fundamentalist denial of Cahokia as a product of the Medieval Warming Period. There is some discussion, in the museum plaques, of the environment that created abundant nourishment for crops and the later crop failures. Along with claims that leadership failed and local warfare brought the large capital to an end. Probably true, but the main cause was the global warming starting in 800CE that ran three hundred years before it ended, called the Medieval Warming Period.
This is the same time the Aztecs built their pyramids, the great Chaco Canyon Culture thrived, the Vikings settled Greenland (that is what they named the ice covered island we see today), explored Northern Canada and the East Coast as far South as the St. Lawrence and apples and oranges were grown in Scotland.
The Lefty-Fundamentalists are trying to promote an armageddon view of global warming to stifle our great commercial society. The fact that there was a recent global warming that only lasted a few hundred years and brought bounty to many parts of the world, contradicts their nonsense. So it is suppressed.
Now you know. Cahokia is a great site to visit. Keep your eyes and your mind open. We live in a period of hysterical Lefty blindness.