by Blake de Pastino
It was ten stories tall, and wider at the base than the Empire State Building. And nearly a thousand years ago, it was the centerpiece of the continent’s largest city north of Mexico.
Today, the search to determine how native engineers built Monk’s
Mound — North America’s biggest prehistoric earthen structure — has
turned up some new and crucial, but very small, clues: the seeds and
spores of ancient plants.
Researchers studying the giant platform mound at the heart of the settlement of Cahokia have studied its internal structure in closer detail than ever. And their new findings suggest that the huge earthwork may have been built surprisingly quickly — perhaps in just a fraction of the time that archaeologists once thought.
It was ten stories tall, and wider at the base than the Empire State Building. And nearly a thousand years ago, it was the centerpiece of the continent’s largest city north of Mexico.
Researchers studying the giant platform mound at the heart of the settlement of Cahokia have studied its internal structure in closer detail than ever. And their new findings suggest that the huge earthwork may have been built surprisingly quickly — perhaps in just a fraction of the time that archaeologists once thought.
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