{"id":8044,"date":"2016-12-21T17:43:13","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T00:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=8044"},"modified":"2017-01-05T17:46:12","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T00:46:12","slug":"paris-in-east-st-louis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/12\/21\/paris-in-east-st-louis\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris In East St. Louis"},"content":{"rendered":"

from Ars Technica<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Finding North America\u2019s lost medieval city<\/h1>\n

Cahokia was bigger than Paris\u2014then it was completely abandoned. I went there to find out why.<\/h2>\n
\n

ANNALEE NEWITZ<\/a><\/p>\n

Artist’s recreation of downtown Cahokia, with Monk’s Mound at its center.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen\u00a0mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls\u00a0today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out\u00a0the region’s tiny\u00a0villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread\u00a0throughout the southeast. Thousands of\u00a0people visited\u00a0for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization.\u00a0Many decided to stay.<\/p>\n

At the city’s apex in 1050, the\u00a0population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest\u00a0pre-Columbian city in what became the United States, bigger than London or\u00a0Paris<\/a>\u00a0at the time. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose\u00a0along the\u00a0eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading\u00a0across the river\u00a0to St. Louis. One particularly magnificent structure, known today as Monk\u2019s Mound, marked the center of downtown. It\u00a0towered 30 meters over an enormous central plaza and had three dramatic ascending levels, each covered in ceremonial buildings. Standing on the highest level, a person speaking loudly\u00a0could be heard<\/a>\u00a0all the way across the Grand Plaza below. Flanking Monk\u2019s Mound to the west was a circle of tall wooden poles, dubbed Woodhenge, that marked the solstices.<\/p>\n

Despite its greatness, the city\u2019s name has been lost to time. Its culture is known simply as Mississippian. When Europeans explored\u00a0Illinois\u00a0in the 17th century, the city had been abandoned for hundreds of years.\u00a0At that time, the\u00a0region was\u00a0inhabited by the Cahokia, a tribe from the Illinois Confederation. Europeans decided to name the ancient city after them, despite the fact that the Cahokia themselves claimed no connection to it.<\/p>\n

Centuries later, Cahokia’s meteoric\u00a0rise and fall remain\u00a0a mystery. It was booming in 1050, and by 1400 its population had disappeared, leaving behind a landscape completely geoengineered by human hands. Looking for clues about its history, archaeologists dig through the thick, wet, stubborn clay that Cahokians once used to construct their mounds. Buried beneath just a few feet of earth are millennia-old building foundations, trash pits, the cryptic remains of public rituals, and in some places, even, graves.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at Ars Technica<\/a> ]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from Ars Technica Finding North America\u2019s lost medieval city Cahokia was bigger than Paris\u2014then it was completely abandoned. I went there to find out why. ANNALEE NEWITZ Artist’s recreation of downtown Cahokia, with Monk’s Mound at its center. A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen\u00a0mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls\u00a0today in Southern Illinois. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}