Cahokia's Woodhenge: a supprising implication * November 26th, 2010 8:54 pm ET
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An introduction to Cahokia and Kolomoki National Historic Landmarks
November is Native American Heritage Month. Today we travel to southern Illinois, where just across the Mississippi River is located the Cahokia Archaeological Zone. Cahokia was the largest known Native American city north of Mexico. At its peak population around 1250 AD, it was larger that London, England. Of course, Cahokia was not its real name. No one knows its real name. Unlike the ancient towns in the Southeast, where direct descendants of the original occupants still live, no one even knows yet what happened to the population of Cahokia, after it was abandoned.
There was an indigenous village in the vicinity of Cahokia as early as 600 AD. Around 800 AD, newcomers arrived and introduced large scale agriculture and different styles of artifacts. They built few mounds. The mounds they did build were relatively small. The village was also rather modest in size until around 1100 AD, when the population exploded. The original village was razed and a new grand plaza was constructed nearby that included the beginnings of many new, large mounds.
During the 1980s archaeologists working at Cahokia discovered a circle of postholes some distance away from the main acropolis. The postholes were far to spread apart to be a ruins of a building. The archaeologists eventually decided that the posts functioned as a solar observatory . . . a sun dial. Since the circle of posts seemed have the function as Stonehenge in England, it was labeled “Wood-henge.”
In the years, since several more woodhenges have been discovered at Cahokia. Archaeologists have also found substantial evidence that when posts rotted in these woodhenges, they were replaced. Journalists writing articles on Cahokia were somehow given the impression that Cahokia was the only location in North America where woodhenges had been discovered. They had the same impression about the “keyhole” houses that suddenly appeared in southern Illinois at the time of Cahokia’s founding. The journalists dutifully put out articles stating this. Subsequently, the assumed facts were included in books on Cahokia by non-archaeologists. Now such statements are a standard feature of the many web sites that discuss Cahokia.
In 2010 archaeologists working in the vicinity of Stonehenge, England discovered a woodhenge there too. It seems to predate the better known Stonehenge, but also apparently was used concurrently with some of the many stonehenges on the Salisbury Plain.
And now for the rest of the story . . .
As was discussed in the previous Examiner on the stone circles of Alberta Province, Canada, the use of boulders, stones or timbers to create observatories did not begin at Cahokia. In fact, one Canadian “stonehenge” has been definitively dated to being older that the “real” Stonehenge in England. It was constructed around 3000 BC. See:
http://www.examiner.com/architecture-design-in-national/who-built-the-ancient-stone-architecture-of-canada-and-new-england-part-2While the archaeologists at Cahokia were getting great media coverage due to their proximity to several major Midwestern cities, a smaller archaeological team with significantly less financial support was making major discoveries at Kolomoki National Historic Landmark deep in the southwestern corner of Georgia. Kolomoki is a large site, but much smaller than Cahokia. The word means “Smoke Rings” in the Hitchiti Creek language, and is derived from the name of a Creek Indian town that existed there when Europeans were arriving in the region. Kolomoki was founded around 0 AD and was abandoned for a few centuries by 600 AD. The occupants built at least seven mounds. The largest temple mound is larger than any at Cahokia, except Monks Mound. However, most of these mounds were begun a thousand years before those at Cahokia.
The Kolomoki archaeologists discovered many “key hole” houses in Kolomoki, but they are extremely rare elsewhere in the region. They also discovered a woodhenge near the largest mound at Kolomoki, that previously had been assumed to be a small mound. The difference about these structures is that they were much, much older than their counterparts at Cahokia. The folks at Kolomoki began constructing woodhenges at least by 100 AD, a thousand years before those at Cahokia.
Artifacts found inside the keyhole houses suggest that they were first built around 200-250 AD. See the slide show for a drawing of a keyhole house. The occupants of Kolomoki continued to build keyhole houses until the town was abandoned around 600 AD. About 100 years after the abandonment of Kolomoki, the keyhole houses showed up at a big town site on the Arkansas River near Little Rock, called Toltec. About another 100 years after that the keyhole houses showed up in Southern Illinois.
The archaeologists of the Kolomoki site probably got good coverage from the Early County News, but very little else. The head of the project, Thomas J. Pluckhat wrote an excellent book on Kolomoki. Unfortunately, it was probably bought mostly by fools like this Examiner. Needless to say, it didn’t make the New York Times best seller list. Apparently, the archaeologists in the Midwest never learned what Dr. Pluckhat’s team had discovered. Books and web sites from the region continue to treat woodhenges, large mounds and keyhole houses as being unique to the Greater Saint Louis Metropolitan Area.
Implications
A reader might be tempted to think . . , Ah-ah! The people of Kolomoki suddenly abandoned their town and headed west to the Mississippi River. Conversely, perhaps they were enslaved and taken westward. Along the way, they picked up the knowledge of growing Mexican type crops; then headed northward up the Mississippi because they heard that there was a huge expanse of rich bottomland near where the Missouri and Ohio Rivers joined the Mississippi that was ideal for growing corn. This, in fact, may have been the case. At this point, that explanation can only be considered speculative.
What the presence of such things as woodhenges and stone circles at several locations in North America does say is that Native Americans had knowledge of astronomy for thousands of years before the arrival of European. They were not ignorant savages wandering through the woods picking blackberries; although blackberries are might tasty in the late spring. Apparently, much of the knowledge of the ages was lost when approximately 90% of the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere died from European diseases, weapons and enslavement. We can not judge the sophistication of Native cultures based on their condition, when first contacted by English colonists.
One other thing . . . the woodhenges may have not been solely used as observatories. The posts in the holes, may have not been made by crude tree trunks. John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony in 1585, and an accomplished artist, created many drawings of the Native Peoples near Fort Roanoke. One of his more famous drawings portrays men and women dancing around a large circle created by carved wooden totems with human faces. The imprints of postholes that survive today at Cahokia and Kolomoki may have, in fact, held wooden statues of famous ancestors. The Spanish did mention seeing wooden statues of famous ancestors in the vicinity of mounds and temples in what is now Georgia and South Carolina. White’s drawing is included in the attached slide show.
Well, the truth is out there somewhere!
http://www.examiner.com/architecture-design-in-national/cahokia-s-woodhenge-a-supprising-implication
