Cahokia

[uniface]

According to this new book by University of Illinois archaeologist and professor of anthropology Tim Pauketat, the mound builders were not always the idyllic, corn-growing, pottery-making, fishing-hunting gentle villagers depicted in various dioramas at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville.

Pauketat said these long-vanished people practiced human sacrifice of women and men on a mass scale and weren't always careful to bury only the dead.

http://www.bnd.com/news/local/story/875703.html

 

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[Tnmountains]

All so true. It seems that many groups were very similar to the Mayans and Aztec's when de-soto came through. They often carved and wore human bones and teeth. Many were sacrificed and like I have said before the women were held in high esteem and often buried with grave goods that we would associate with someone of high rank. Some groups would deflesh the corpse before burying the bones as well.
They discovered much evidence of this type of activity when they did the excavations for all of the TVA impoundments. Many Temple mounds support his book.
Thanks Uni for bringing this to our attention

 

[coteau]

Interesting article. I haven't read much about human sacrifice in Mississippian cultures. I might have to check the book out.

On a different subject, I know how common warfare was from A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1400 throughout North America. The largest known (excavated) prehistoric massacre in North America is at the Crow Creek site in South Dakota, 500 people were killed and mutilated around A.D. 1325. The evidence suggests that the ancestral Mandans attacked the ancestral Arikara Indians because they were encroaching onto their territory. The Crow Creek village didn't have a very well constructed fortification system, obviously.

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/northamerica/crowcreekmassacre.html