Western Digs reveals the latest discovery from the metropolis of middle America – where they practiced human sacrifice with their own citizens:
But one of the many mysteries lingering among the city’s ruins, just outside modern-day St. Louis, is a burial mound excavated in the 1960s and found to contain more than 270 bodies — almost all of them young women killed as victims of human sacrifice.
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For decades, the prevailing theory has been that its victims were forcibly brought to Cahokia from regions under the city’s control, and sacrificed as offerings to its rulers, its dead, or its deities.
“The initial interpretation of the burials of young women suggested they represented ‘tribute’ from outlying communities,” [Dr. Phil] Slater[, an anthropologist at the Illinois State Archaeological Survey] said.
“Our analysis provide[s] … evidence that suggests the young women may have come from within the region, if not from Cahokia itself.”
What’s more, the research done by Slater and his colleagues finds that the same is true for the 39 victims of the more violent, traumatic deaths in the mound.
They’re not only local, the results show; they also turn out to be the most biologically different from the rest of the dead found in the mound. And yet, they’re also the most similar to each other, suggesting that they may have been members of a unique, and perhaps isolated, population within Cahokia.
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And the results showed that, based on their chemical traces, the dead were largely, but not exclusively, local to the floodplain where Cahokia was built, known as the American Bottom.
Of those buried in Feature 105, for instance, about 7 percent of the teeth revealed levels of strontium that were not consistent with the immediate Cahokia area.
In Feature 214, 36 percent of the teeth turned out to have non-local signatures.
And for those who had been carefully buried in the upper layer of Feature 229, 17 percent of the teeth contained non-local levels of strontium.
But for the people buried below them, who had been violently killed and dumped, their teeth were all exclusively within the range of Cahokia’s strontium ratios — and they also displayed the smallest degree of variation in their chemistry.
What’s more, Slater said, the physical measurements of their teeth revealed even more surprising results.
The shapes and sizes of the mutilated victims’ teeth were uniquely similar to each other, and were also different from the morphologies of the teeth of the other victims.
“The 229-lower feature stood out among the four [features], because it seems to have been composed of a distinct sub-population within Cahokia,” he said.