Cahokia, an Amerindian town on the Mississippi of 10,000 to 20,000 people. A forerunner of what might have been? Native Indian societies are widely seen as unchanging before Europeans came into the picture. This view sometimes has almost religious overtones. Amerindians lived in harmony with their world, and this harmony was broken by the White... Read More

Pre-Columbian copper artifacts from Illinois, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois. In my last post, I criticized Jared Diamond’s theory about continent orientation and cultural evolution. This theory posits that people, and hence ideas, are likelier to circulate along an east-west axis than along a north-south one. This is because people tend to move about in environments... Read More