2023-04-16 15:29:38
In 1492, Columbus sailed across the blue ocean and the world, for better or worse, was changed forever. Massive transfers of wealth from the Americas to Europe began, the populations of American cultures were decimated by plagues to which they had no immunity, and suddenly everyone was throwing themselves into shipbuilding.
For centuries following Europe’s contact with the Americas, the established narrative was the chauvinistic imperial line of cultured Europeans bringing civilization to the savages of the New World. This may have been suitable for Europeans, but we now know that it simply wasn’t true.
Instead, Columbus and those who followed him found a land filled not only with existing cultures, but also with a rich history of older civilizations, now lost. Evidence of their existence can be found throughout the landscape of the Americas to this day, dotting the landscape.
Everyone knows regarding the Aztecs and the Incas, but they were just the latest in a long line of cultures. Here are seven such cultures in North America that preceded them, in pictures.
1.- Cahokia
In southern Illinois, situated along the Mississippi River at Collinsville, an ancient settlement we call Cahokia rose to great power between AD 800 and 1200. The massive complex once contained up to 40,000 people and spanned nearly 4,000 acres ( 1,600 hectares). The most notable features of the site are man-made earthen mounds that housed temples, political buildings, and burial pits. The Cahokia mounds are a testament to the highly organized culture of the early Mississippians who built the largest city in pre-Columbian North America (Kent/Adobe Stock).
2.- Hopewell
Cahokia not old enough for you? Get a taste of the Hopewell tradition, a trading network of interconnected Native American cultures centered throughout the eastern United States, from the Great Lakes to what is now the Florida panhandle. These people used the rivers to travel between them for approximately six centuries from c100 BCE. C. and developed a sophisticated interconnected and interdependent network. They also built giant mounds, and we don’t know why (Rdikeman / CC BY-SA 3.0).
3.- Geoglyph of serpent
However, the eastern United States was not empty before the Hopewell tradition, and the peoples who came before it had been altering the landscape for centuries. One of the most impressive examples is the Serpent Geoglyph along the Great Ohio River. The serpent’s head is consuming an egg-shaped mound that may be an egg, a sun, or the remains of some sort of focal ceremonial platform. The geoglyph may have been made as early as 800 BC. C., possibly by the Adana culture, but remains an enigma (Timothy Price / CC BY 2.5).
4.- Chaco Canyon Town
In the west, in what is now New Mexico, the Puebloans of Chaco Canyon flourished. They built a major shopping center here, the remains of which attest to their scope: the buildings are some of the largest ever built in the pre-Columbian United States, and there is evidence that building materials were collected from great distances. Puebloans also seemed to have a strange fixation on polydactyly, and those with an extra finger or toe were favored by the gods (National Park Service/United States).
5.- Poverty Point Culture
Probably the second true culture to emerge in North America, the Bronze Age Poverty Point culture along the Mississippi River was truly ancient, thriving from 1750 B.C. C., for approximately 400 years. Its people lived in towns that lined the banks of the river for regarding 100 miles (160 km), centered around a huge plaza of concentric rings of ditches. The site also includes a massive earthen pyramid (US Army Corps of Engineers / Public domain).
6.- Freno Watson
The Poverty Point earthworks are the second oldest, but the first large-scale earthworks are an astonishing 1900 years older. The Watson Brake complex, dating to around 3500 B.C. C., is older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian pyramids. Its very existence has confounded our understanding of cultural development in the United States, since it must have been built by a hunter-gatherer society without complex social organization or trade networks. It might be what fueled the rise of the society in North America (Herb Roe / CC BY-SA 4.0)
7.- The people of Dorset
From the oldest culture to one of the most enduring, the Dorset people thrived in the subarctic regions of Canada from 500 B.C. C. until possibly until 1500 d. C. They were here when Darius the Great ruled Persia, and they may still be here when Henry VIII ruled England. Remarkably, they were completely distinct from contemporary and later cultures in the same area, producing beautiful whale and walrus ivory carvings (dalbera / CC BY 2.0)
Top Image: Cliff Palace lookout in Mesa Verde National Park, United States. Source: Stephen/Adobe Stock.
Autor Joseph Green
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#lost #cultures #preColumbian #North #America #Crónica #Viva