Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2015 i Cobblestone American History and Current Events for Kids and Children

Did you know that the largest prehistoric settlement in the Americas north of Mexico was in the heart of the present-day United States? Its name was Cahokia. Located in Collinsville, Illinois, eight miles east of St. Louis, Missouri, Cahokia dates back to A.D. 700 when it was first settled by people of the late Woodland culture. It was the later Mississippian people of Cahokia, however, who built the many earthen mounds, which looked like flat-top pyramids. Archaeologists believe that Cahokia once had as many as 120 mounds over a six-square-mile area. Today, 80 mounds remain. Some of these mounds are low slopes that gently rise up from the ground. Other mounds are 20 to 40 feet high, and one mound is 100 feet high. At Cahokia’s peak, from A.D. 1050…

The men of the Pocola Mining Company had been warned to stay away from the Craig Mound in eastern Oklahoma, but their greed and desperation during the Great Depression was too great. Eighteen months of digging had revealed a remarkable collection of artifacts that had created a strong interest among artifact dealers. The mining company members wanted to see what else they could find before their lease expired in the fall of 1935. So even though a new law had been passed to protect the prehistoric site at Spiro and keep unauthorized people away, the pothunters returned that summer. The men believed that they might be kicked off the site again at any moment, so they worked quickly. They dug an unreinforced tunnel about four feet wide and five or…

Some other famous prehistoric earthen mounds are: Grave Creek Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia, is the largest known conical mound. It is believed to be made of 60,000 tons of earth. It was built about 2,000 years ago. Serpent Mound, located in southern Ohio, is a famous effigy mound that represents an uncoiling serpent. It is about 2,000 years old. Located in northern Louisiana, Watson Brake consists of 11 mounds and is the oldest known mound complex in North America. It is believed to have been constructed about 5,400 years ago. At its peak, Moundville, Alabama, may have extended over a 300-acre area and included 26 mounds. It is about 1,000 years old. Castalian Springs Mound Site in northern Tennessee included about 12 platform mounds and 1 burial mound. It…

We cannot turn back the clock to the point before the Craig Mound at Spiro was looted. But we can learn from what happened there and work to prevent it from happening again. Let’s take a moment to consider the bigger picture and the part you play in Spiro’s story. For make no mistake about it—you have a role to play. WHAT’S AT STAKE? The looting of the Craig Mound in the 1930s is perhaps one of the most heartbreaking stories in U.S. archaeology. But Spiro was not the first site to be destroyed, and its story is not unique. A number of sites in the United States have suffered similar fates at the hands of looters. Some cases, such as Spiro, made the headlines and the news. Others have…

Archaeology is the study of prehistoric people and cultures through the examination of artifacts, monuments, or remains of sites. It is made up of two ancient Greek words: archaios, meaning “ancient” or “old,” and logos, meaning “word” or “speech.” In ancient Greece, archaeology meant a “study of ancient things.” The people who lead such studies are known as archaeologists. Answer to Dr. D’s Mystery Hero from page 45 : Thomas Jefferson Picture Credits: front cover Courtesy Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center, photo: Dennis Peterson; front cover (bkgd), ii (TL), 2–3 (BL) Deborah McCague/Shutterstock.com; ii (TR), 16 Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection 19394.1; ii (BR), 4, 6 Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com; ii (UL), 36–37, 37 (BR) 39 (BL) Erik Campos. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK; 7 (Painting: William R. Iseminger), 8 (T), 9 (R,…

Oklahoma’s Spiro was an important prehistoric Native American ceremonial and trade center with connections that extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and from California to the East Coast. Spiro was established as a permanent settlement by A.D. 800, but people were living in the area beginning 8,000 years earlier. Its role as a ceremonial center declined by A.D. 1450. The mounds were built hundreds of years before mechanical vehicles and without horses, mules, or oxen. In other words, the work was all done by people carrying baskets full of earth. Some of the mounds at Spiro appear to have been constructed to form an enormous calendar or observatory to keep track of the seasons. At sunset during the seasonal solstices and equinoxes, the mounds line up.…

On October 29, 1929, the stock market on Wall Street crashed. It signaled the end of a decade of economic prosperity in the United States. The crash was followed by more than a decade of economic hardship known as the Great Depression. Almost overnight, banks lost all their money, businesses closed, and people were either out of work or worried they would soon be unemployed. During the worst of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, farmers on the Great Plains also endured the Dust Bowl. Severe drought and poor agricultural practices resulted in soil that was unable to produce crops. The dry land was stirred up into enormous dust storms. So how is Spiro—a prehistoric Native American mound site in eastern Oklahoma—tied to the Great Depression and the Dust…

For the people at Spiro, chunkey was a game and a sacred reenactment of the Morning Star story from the Beginning Times. Archaeologists think not only that people at Spiro considered chunkey to be a form of prayer and ritual reenactment, but also that playing chunkey might have been a way of settling disputes, conducting diplomacy, redistributing wealth, and relieving social tensions. The wealth of entire towns, families, and even human lives may have been tied to the outcome of a game. Here is a retelling of how the game of chunkey began. In the Beginning Time, just after Breath Giver created the world, monsters and giants roamed the earth. In those perilous times, First Man and First Woman gave birth to twin boys called Morning Star and Thrown Away…

When it comes to protecting unique historic sites, work remains to be done. Men looted more than 900 Native American graves at the Mississippian culture site at Slack Farm in Kentucky in 1987. In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested looters and antiquities traffickers in Utah who had dug up and sold artifacts from ancestral Puebloan sites in the Four Corners area. In 2013, a metal-detecting, artifact-hunting competition at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation in Virginia took place where three known cemeteries—containing Woodland Indians, 1620s colonists, and enslaved people from around 1760—were located. Participants in the competition found more than 8,500 artifacts dating from the Civil War or earlier. No one knows how many graves they disturbed. For more about efforts to preserve archaeological sites, check out these sites: ›…

Would you like to see thousands of prehistoric artifacts in one room? Get close enough to count the beads on a Lakota moccasin? Examine Clovis points once used to hunt Ice Age mammoths and mastodons? Study an artifact found at Spiro Mounds? The Kravis Discovery Center at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, offers all that and more! Today, most people live in a world filled with modern conveniences. Our lives include electricity, running water, grocery stores, mass transportation, and of course computers and smartphones. These conveniences have all become common in the last 100 to 150 years. Our experiences are very different from those of people who lived long ago. Many of the items in the Kravis Discovery Center appear alien to modern people. After all, most people today…

Archaeologists have found evidence of chunkey in sites from North Dakota to South Carolina, and from Wisconsin to Oklahoma. The game was played among the Mississippian mound-building people, which include the Caddoan people who built Spiro. Ancient artwork captures people playing the game, and European explorers also described it. It seems to be based on a type of hoop-and-stick game. The oldest chunkey stones date to the A.D. 600s and first appear in Missouri and Illinois. Some chunkey stones are crude and made of baked clay, while others are finely crafted from exotic stone and polished until they shine. Small chunkey stones have been found, too, which archaeologists believe indicates that children learned how to play the game as soon as they could walk. The method of playing the game…

Spiro’s discovery offered archaeologists a fascinating look at early Native Americans. Other ancient people have left similar clues all over the world, some of which have raised more questions than answers. A HIDDEN VILLAGE After a huge storm ripped grass from the dunes on Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 1850, an ancient settlement was revealed. A village became visible at Skara Brae, where roofless stone houses still held the remains of stone dressers, beds, and seats. People were living at Skara Brae before the Egyptian pyramids were built, almost 5,000 years ago. Built of close-set stone slabs, the structures were partly underground with covered passages connecting them. The objects found in the site’s middens—including dice, jewelry, pottery, and tools—along with the amazingly well-preserved houses have made it possible for archaeologists to…