By George Laidlaw
Sometimes we ‘Westerner’ immigrants from Europe believe that the Europeans, whether British or French or others arrived in North America and brought civilization to the Natives that were already here.
Our superior attitude may not stand up to investigation.
A farmer outside Collinsville, Illinois, was worried about the strange hills or mounds in his fields. He thought they might be glacial moraines and he wanted to find out what they were.
An archaeologist started to drill test holes and they discovered a modern wonder in the New World.
In his field he found evidence of a civilization that had lived in a city of 20,000 and at the time, in the 12th century, was as large as Paris.
It was before Natives had the tribes of today.
The Cahokian Mounds gives ethnologists and archaeologists a completely different understanding of how diverse and rich the native populations were back when the Europeans were in the Dark Ages.
To read an interesting history of this remarkable discovery read The Mystery of the Ballerina’s Tear,Vol. 20 by George Laidlaw, in the series The Large Adventures of the Incredible Smalls www.georgelalidlaw.ca A Young Adult book
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