"In 1991, while serving as the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, historian Roger Kennedy was shocked to learn for the first time that massive ancient city remains existed in North America."
So opens "Ancient Voices - Cahokia: America's Lost City," one of several fascinating documentaries freely available online.
"Cahokia Mound is bigger in its footprint than the Great Pyramid of Giza," says Kennedy. "We didn't know that."
Didn't know it, and in a big way.
These ingenious and indigenous constructions once dotted the ancient North American landscape. And most Americans have no idea.
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and more US states hold, beneath their cities, the staggering magnitude of one of early humankind's greatest accomplishments.
No one knows exactly why they were made, and no one knows at all what happened to the people who, like the cliff-dwelling Anasazi, vanished from history. But we know they had trade routes stretching across North America for thousands of years.
Mounds appear to have been built in stages and added onto over time. At its height, Cahokia held more people than there were in Medieval London or Rome.
"The Lost Civilizations of North America" and "Ancient America Mounds" (featuring actor Wes Studi) round out the mound-builders search.
Settlers 200 years ago knew of the Mississippian mound-builders. Indeed, St. Louis used to be known as Mound City. Over time, however, this knowledge was forgotten because the fact of vast ancient North American cities flew inconveniently in the face of the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It conflicted with the supposition of American character and uniqueness.
According to Kennedy, there are "tens of thousands of architectural consequences that are now hidden behind our junk."
Hardly the first time that the truth was buried to protect political and scientific agendas. Witness, for example, the case of the Piltdown Man hoax, which resulted from someone's attempt to make the world believe that the first human being was an Englishman.
Keep in mind, these are not major motion pictures. No major motion pictures on Cahokia exist. Yet the information they contain staggers the imagination.
Because the discovery of antiquities conflicted with the sense of European immigrant importance, and the desire to view Native Americans as savages while shoving and shooting across the West, these ancient cities of an advanced people which undermined wrongly established view were ignored for as long as possible.
But not anymore.
Stewart Kirby writes for
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