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Visiting the Cahokia Mounds made me question the 'mysterious collapse' story
I was at the Cahokia Mounds site in Illinois a few weeks back, and the main visitor center narrative really pushes this idea of a sudden, mysterious collapse around 1350 AD. But walking the grounds, especially the huge Monks Mound, I saw clear signs of long-term wear and soil issues. In my experience managing sites, that looks more like slow decline from resource strain than a single event. The popular 'mystery' angle feels like it ignores simpler explanations, like the place just got too big to manage over a couple hundred years. Has anyone else dug into the environmental data there and come away thinking the story is too neat?
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the_ruby6mo ago
Monks Mound is like 100 feet tall, and they think it just fell apart overnight?
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rose_craig976mo ago
That mound took centuries to build, so its collapse was definitely not a quick process.
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