Guest
Guest
 |  Subject: Human Sacrifices… The Upper Word… The Lower World… And The Secrets Of North America’s Lost Cahokian City  Sun Dec 18, 2016 7:48 am | |
| Human Sacrifices… The Upper Word… The Lower World… And The Secrets Of North America’s Lost Cahokian City
December 18, 2016 by SkyWatch Editor
 When Fowler and his colleagues dug, they discovered that Mound 72’s ridge top was actually built over three previous mounds, each one marking a significant moment in the city’s history during the 10th and 11th centuries. One of those mounds contained the bodies of 52 young women, sacrificed in some way that did not leave marks on their bones. Their bodies had been stacked in two tidy layers on top of clay platforms, then ritualistically covered over with earth. Another held the bodies of men on litters, similarly arrayed. Buried beneath thousands of pounds of clay for centuries, their skeletons were pressed as flat as flowers between the pages of a book. Oxygen isotope analysis of their teeth, which can pinpoint where people were born, shows these people were all local to the American Bottom […] Without a time machine, we’ll never know exactly what the Cahokians’ political struggles were about. Still, we have some hints about how they saw the world. The symbols they left behind suggest they divided the universe into an Upper World of spirits and ancestors, an Underworld of Earth and animals, and a human world in between. These worlds were not entirely separated, and the liminal spaces where they intermingled were places of great power. Images that bring worlds together are common in Mississippian art. The Upper World, represented by thunder and spirits, and the Underworld, represented by water and agriculture, are intertwined. (READ MORE) |
|
