ARCHAEOLOGY: Cahokia-- Pitfalls of the Darkened Heart: Human Sacrifice

Because that, when they knew God, 

they glorified Him not as God, 

neither were thankful; 

but became vain in their imaginations, 

and their foolish heart was darkened.

Romans 1:21

"The practice of human sacrifice in America's largest prehistoric city was more subtle and complex than experts once thought, new research suggests.

Recent studies into the remains of sacrificial victims at the ancient city of Cahokia reveal that those who were killed were not captives taken from outlying regions, as many archaeologists had believed.
Instead, they may have been residents of the same community that killed them.

When Cahokia was at its peak 900 years ago, it was the largest city in what's now the United States, a metropolis of about 15,000 people in southwestern Illinois.

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.
Dated to between 1000 and 1100 A.D., their remains were mostly buried in large pits, laid out in neat rows, and bearing few signs of physical trauma, perhaps killed by strangulation or blood-letting.

But the mound also contained a striking group of outliers: a separate deposit of some 39 men and women, ranging in age from 15 to 45, who - unlike the rest - had been subjected to all manner of physical violence: brutal fractures, shot with stone points still embedded in their bones, even decapitation.

For more than 50 years, archaeologists have puzzled over the grisly scenes found in the mound, known as Mound 72.
"It is the significant site in this region and foundational to our understanding of Mississippian culture within this region and beyond," said Dr. Phil Slater.
"One of the big questions raised by the finds at Mound 72 focused on the mass burial events. Those appear to be unique, certainly unique to have so many such features within a single small mound."
"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.

Among them: a grave known as Feature 214, thought to be one of the earliest mass burials in the mound, featuring 24 bodies arranged in two layers and dated to around the year 1000;
and also Feature 105, dated to around 1050, where more than 50 were buried in two layers of two rows, aligned shoulder to shoulder;
and finally Feature 229, which included two layers of human remains - an upper layer of 15 men and women, whose remains were gently laid to rest on cedar litters, and 229-lower - the mass grave of 39 men and women whose mutilated bodies appear to have been dumped, rather than peacefully interred.

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.
"Both the strontium and dental data of the group show that they separate themselves from the rest of Mound 72." 

Ancient Pages

***It would seem likely that the slaughtered people who faced a violent death were likely from a nearby village---captives of war.

Somewhat related to the people of the city---but more distant yet closely related to each other.

***Those neatly buried in mass graves who suffered a kinder, gentler death were likely locals sacrificed during crises times to the gods such as during a famine or plague. For example, their mass graves seem to be at times with long gaps of time between. That would indicate something was happening at that point and time that was considered by them to be dire when the sacrifices were offered en mass. 

***But all this Human Sacrifice, to likely appease False gods, stems from the Heart that was Darkened.