They Found the Answer to Cahokia

They Found the Answer to Cahokia Everyone agrees Cahokia was abandoned, and for decades everyone agreed on why. Drought killed the maize, the surplus vanished, twenty thousand people walked away from the largest city north of Mexico. In twenty twenty four somebody finally tested it directly, running carbon isotopes on botanical remains from across the site, and the signature simply is not there. No crop failure. No prairie reclaiming the fields. The flood theory failed the same way, with stable ground surfaces exactly where the sediments should have been. In this one I go through how much else has come apart. Strontium showing roughly a third of the burial population grew up hundreds of kilometres away, which is not how a chiefdom works. A bald cypress log hauled over a hundred miles to stand at the centre of the city. And Mound 72, where the fifty three sacrificed young women turned out to include males, the two central figures turned out to be male-female pairs, and the victims turned out to be local rather than captives. Fifty years of divine kingship narrative, undone by the same bones. Then the fecal stanols in Horseshoe Lake, which show the signal dropping after the city empties and then rising again from the fifteen hundreds. The landscape every textbook calls abandoned was occupied the whole time. From Wikimedia Commons — commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: plus the filename, except where an archive.org link is given. *CC-BY* Cahokia - panoramio — C. Mandel · Cahokia Mounds -- UNESCO reconstruction — Thank You (24 Millions) views · Excavation at Monks Mound in Cahokia taken August 1st, 2007 — K. Cramer · Human skeleton remains — T. Quine · Monks Mound - Summer 2024 — Skubasteve834 · Pottery Conservation Laboratory (5170518414) — K. Kapoutsis · [None], C.F [Castle Farm] Trench C1 From Burnt Hut — A. Gibson, archive.org/details/GIB006008000021 *CC-BY-SA* 02024 0844 Archaeology Laboratory Workshop / 02024 0849 Identifying pottery sherds — Silar · A hut in Village — P. Bopche · Archaeological excavation — blogspot · Artifacts found in situ within an archaeological trench at the burial ground — Chudilovski ph · Cahokia monks mound HRoe 2008 / Cahokia reconstructed palisade HRoe 01 / Mound 72 Woodhenge diagram HRoe 2013 — H. Roe · Cahokia-Monks-Mound — S. Greenwell · Calibre medidor de grosores — Kilezz · Chemistry Laboratory - Bench — Jean-Pierre · Cultivated field - geograph.org.uk - 7267277 — D. Pashley · Dülmen, Kirchspiel, Börnste, Felder und Bäume -- 2017 -- 3220-6 — D. Rabich · Lacustrine deposits — VickRomanoff · Maize field - geograph.org.uk - 5057565 — D. P. Howard · Mound 72 — J. King · Nemadji River Floodplain Forest — J. Mayer · Occurrences of Soil erosion — John · Zea mays(312, 5x) — Grand-Duc *CC-BY-NC* LKB Mass Spectrometer — Faculty of Arts and Science, archive.org/details/I0069-02-0037 *CC-BY-NC-SA* View of Stretch of River — H. S. Pepoon, archive.org/details/GPN-984_Pepoon_View-of-Stretch-of-River_lowres