Category Archives: U.S.A

New Plant Identified in 1,400-Year-Old Pipe in Washington

New Plant Identified in 1,400-Year-Old Pipe in Washington

Rhus glabra, a herb commonly known as smooth sumac, was smoked by people in the Washington State more than 1.400 years ago.

The finding was made by a team of researchers from the State University of Washington is the first time scientists in an archeological pipe have detected the remains of a non-tobacco plant. Who would have thought tobacco-free alternatives would have been so popular all those years ago? This discovery is pretty remarkable.

The Native American pipe, unearthed in Central Washington, also contained residues N. quadrivalvis, a tobacco species currently not cultivated in the area but which is believed to have been widely grown in the past. Until now, Ancient people in the American Northwest had only thought about using special smoking herb mixtures.

Replica pipes used to experimentally “smoke” tobacco and other native plants in WSU laboratories for the study. The charred residue is then extracted, chemically “fingerprinted”, and compared to the residue of ancient archaeological pipes.

“Smoking often played a religious or ceremonial role for Native American tribes and our research shows these specific plants were important to these communities in the past,” said Korey Brownstein, a former WSU Ph.D. student now at the University of Chicago and lead author of a study on the research in the journal Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. “We think the Rhus glabra may have been mixed with tobacco for its medicinal qualities and to improve the flavor of smoke.”

The discovery was made possible by a new metabolomics-based analysis method that can detect thousands of plant compounds or metabolites in residue collected from pipes, bowls, and other archeological artifacts. The compounds can then be used to identify which plants were smoked or consumed.

“Not only does it tell you, yes, you found the plant you’re interested in, but it also can tell you what else was being smoked,” said David Gang, a professor in WSU’s Institute of Biological Chemistry and a co-author of the study. “It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that this technology represents a new frontier in archaeo-chemistry.”

Previously, the identification of ancient plant residues relied on the detection of a limited number of biomarkers, such as nicotine, anabasine, cotinine, and caffeine. Gang said the issue with this approach is while the presence of a biomarker like nicotine shows tobacco was smoked it doesn’t distinguish which species it was.

“Also, if you are only looking for a few specific biomarkers, you aren’t going to be able to tell what else was consumed in the artifact,” Gang said.

In addition to identifying the first non-tobacco plant smoked in an archaeological pipe, the WSU researchers’ work also helps elucidate the complex evolution of tobacco trade in the American Northwest.

Analysis of a second pipe that was used by people living in Central Washington after Euro-American contact revealed the presence of a different tobacco species, N. Rustica, which was grown by native peoples on the east coast of what is now the United States.

“Our findings show Native American communities interacted widely with one another within and between ecological regions, including the trade of tobacco seeds and materials,” said Shannon Tushingham, an assistant professor of anthropology at WSU and co-author of the study.

“The research also casts doubt on the commonly held view that trade tobacco grown by Europeans overtook the use of natively-grown smoke plants after Euro-American contact.”

Moving forward, the WSU researchers’ work could ultimately help scientists studying ancient societies in the Americas and elsewhere around the globe identify which plant species ancient people were consuming, providing important information about the evolution of drug use and similar plant-human dynamics.

Closer to home, the WSU team is also putting their work to use helping confirm connections between ancient plant management practices from before the arrival of Western settlers with cultural traditions of modern indigenous communities such as the Nez Perce.

The researchers shared their work with members of the tribe who also used some of the seeds from the study to grow some of the pre-contact tobacco.

The smoking of tobacco is a sacred tradition for Native American groups including the Nez Perce, Colville, and other northwest Tribes and before now it was impossible to tell which kind of tobacco their ancestors smoked.

“We took over an entire greenhouse to grow these plants and collected millions of seeds so that the Nez Perce people could reintroduce these native plants back onto their land,” Brownstein said.

“I think these kinds of projects are so important because they help build trust between us and tribal communities and show that we can work together to make discoveries.”

Scientists In Kansas Discover 91-Million Year Old Fossil Of A Shark That Had Cannibal Babies

Scientists In Kansas Discover 91-Million Year Old Fossil Of A Shark That Had Cannibal Babies

A newly discovered Cretodus Houghtonorum fossil shark aged 91 million years old in the Kansas region is part of the list of large dinosaur-era animals.

Researchers have identified the remains of an entirely new species of prehistoric shark in Kansas, which lived during the age of the dinosaurs and may have measured around 17 feet in length.

Cretodus houghtonorum was a spectacular, almost 7 feet long shark, or slightly more than 5 meters long, preserved in sediment deposited in an ancient ocean called the West’s Inland Waterway which covers North America during the Late Cretaceous period (144 million to66 million years ago), based on a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate paleontology.

In 2010, researchers Kenshu Shimada and Michael Everhart and 2 people of central Kansas, Fred Smith and Gail Pearson, found and excavated the fossil shark on the ranch near Tipton, Kansas.

Researchers excavate a farm in Kansas where the Credotus teeth were found

Shimada is a professor of paleobiology at DePaul University in Chicago. He and Everhart are both adjunct research associates at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas.

The species name houghtonorum is in honor of Keith and Deborah Houghton, the landowners who donated the specimen to the museum for science. Although a largely disarticulated and incomplete skeleton, it represents the best Cretodus specimen discovered in North America, according to Shimada.

The discovery consists of 134 teeth, 61 vertebrae, 23 placoid scales and fragments of calcified cartilage, which when analyzed by scientists provided a vast amount of biological information about the extinct shark.

A tooth belonging to a Credotus houghtonorum, which lived 91 million years ago in the ocean that once covered the Great Plains, including Kansas

Besides its estimated large body size, anatomical data suggested that it was a rather sluggish shark, belonged to a shark group called Lamniformes that includes modern-day great white and sand tiger sharks as distant cousins, and had a rather distinct tooth pattern for a lamniform shark.

“Much of what we know about extinct sharks is based on isolated teeth, but an associated specimen representing a single shark individual like the one we describe provides a wealth of anatomical information that in turn offers better insights into its ecology,” said Shimada, the lead author on the study.

“As important ecological components in marine ecosystems, understanding about sharks in the past and present is critical to evaluate the roles they have played in their environments and biodiversity through time, and more importantly how they may affect the future marine ecosystem if they become extinct,” he said.

During the excavation, Shimada and Everhart believed they had a specimen of Cretodus crassidens, a species originally described from England and subsequently reported commonly from North America.

However, not even a single tooth matched the tooth shape of the original Cretodus crassidens specimen or any other known species of Cretodus, Shimada said.

“That’s when we realized that almost all the teeth from North America previously reported as Cretodus crassidens belong to a different species new to science,” he noted.

The growth model of the shark calibrated from observed vertebral growth rings indicates that the shark could have theoretically reached up to about 22 feet (about 6.8 meters).

“What is more exciting is its inferred large size at birth, almost 4 feet or 1.2 meters in length, suggesting that the cannibalistic behavior for nurturing embryos commonly observed within the uteri of modern female lamniforms must have already evolved by the late Cretaceous period,” Shimada added.

Furthermore, the Cretodus houghtonorum fossil intriguingly co-occurred with isolated teeth of another shark, Squalicorax, as well as with fragments of two fin spines of a yet another shark, a hybodont shark.

“Circumstantially, we think the shark possibly fed on the much smaller hybodont and was in turn scavenged by Squalicorax after its death,” said Everhart.

Discoveries like this would not be possible without the cooperation and generosity of local landowners, and the local knowledge and enthusiasm of amateur fossil collectors, according to the authors.

“We believe that continued cooperation between paleontologists and those who are most familiar with the land is essential to improving our understanding of the geologic history of Kansas and Earth as a whole,” said Everhart.

The new study, “A new large Late Cretaceous lamniform shark from North America with comments on the taxonomy, paleoecology, and evolution of the genus Cretodus,” will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Treasure worth over $1 million found in the Rocky Mountains after a 10-year search

Treasure worth over $1 million found in the Rocky Mountains after a 10-year search

10-year treasure search is over. Forrest Fenn, a former military pilot, art collector and author who claims to have hidden a treasure chest worth more than 1 million dollars somewhere in the Rocky Mountains in 2010 – attracting worldwide adventure-looking adventurers – finally found the treasuries this weekend in a blog post.

Treasure worth over $1 million found in the Rocky Mountains after a 10-year search

The treasure was found under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains, and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago,”

Fenn wrote Saturday on a blog that explaining to people who were looking for it the end of the treasure hunt: “I do not know who was there but the poem from my book led him to the exact spot,” he wrote.

Fenn confirmed the news to the Santa Fe New Mexican, saying the person who found the treasure chest provided a photograph as evidence of its discovery. Fenn would not confirm where the treasure was found or the identity of the person who found it, only saying the individual was “from back East.”

Forrest Fenn

The discovery puts an end to a quest that Fenn himself has said drew as many as 350,000 people to the Rocky Mountains region in search of the hidden treasure.

The bronze chest was filled with gold coins and rare artifacts with Fenn coming back over the years to add to its bounty. Clues to the treasure’s location were included in a poem in Fenn’s self-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, also published in 2010.

Throughout the years, Fenn has narrowed down the search area to the geographical region of the Rocky Mountains and within the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.

A treasure chest hidden in the Rocky Mountains has been found.

In previous interviews, Fenn said he buried the treasure as a way to give people hope—something he was compelled to do after surviving a terminal cancer diagnosis in 1988.

But the treasure hunt has been controversial, and even dangerous, from the start.

Some say the treasure hunt was a hoax, and the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that five people died while in pursuit of it, though Motherboard has been unable to independently verify those deaths.

In 2017 the New Mexico state police chief asked Fenn to call off the treasure search out of concern for the safety of those seeking it. And a woman who said she solved Fenn’s puzzle claimed that she was “hacked” and that another person stole it out from under her and plans to take legal action. Fenn, for his part, has thus far declined to provide a photograph of the solve.

Dal Neitzel runs a blog popular with those searching for the treasure—the same blog on which Fenn announced Saturday the treasure had been found. Neitzel made his first trip in search of the treasure after hearing about it from a note on Fenn’s website in 2010 and said he has made at least 80 trips in search of the treasure since. He said he had mixed feelings about the news that the treasure had been found.

“Disappointment that it was not me who found it and relief that I can stop being a professional blogger,” Neitzel told Motherboard in an email.

Neitzel said what is now important is that Fenn discloses where the treasure was hidden, for the sake of all the treasure seekers who spent years trying to find it.

“We each want to know how close we actually got,” Neitzel said. “Whether our ideas were solid or crazy.’

Though Neitzel never found the treasure, he doesn’t regret the time he spent looking for it and said he will continue making trips out to the area where it was hidden.

“The beauty of the mountains will be my stated goal from this point forward, rather than the chest,” Neitzel said.

25 Million Old Moqui marbles naturally occurring iron oxide concretions that arise from Navajo sandstone

25 Million Old Moqui marbles naturally occurring iron oxide concretions that arise from Navajo sandstone

Walkers wandering through the sandy canyons of Utah sometimes come across a strange sight. Where the Navajo Sandstone loses its iconic peach, orange, and red stripes, hundreds of round, iron-coated stones often litter the ground.

Sandstone balls are cemented with a strong layer of iron oxide minerals. Moqui marbles, the colored stones spread over the Utah and Arizona, are often called as a stone, and they fall off pale, cream-colored Navajo Sandstone beds when wind and water wash away the softer rock are often known by the name Moqui.

For decades, the rocks were simply a geological oddity. Then, look-alikes were discovered on Mars (the so-called Martian blueberries). The milestone — among the early evidence for water on Mars — boosted interest in Earth’s iron baubles. 

Now, a new study reveals that the Moqui marbles are no more than 25 million years old — a sharp contrast to the 190-million-year-old Navajo Sandstone. Marbles scattered on sandstone slopes in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument are only 2 million to 5 million years old. And on Arizona’s Paria Plateau, the marbles’ iron oxide rind is as young as 300,000 years old, researchers report in the September 2014 issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.

“They really represent a record of how water moved the rock millions of years ago, and the next generation can use them to understand water and life on other planets,” said Marjorie Chan, co-author of the new study and a geologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Odd balls

The moqui marbles’ precise ages come from a radioactive clock. The iron oxide minerals contain traces of radioactive uranium and thorium, and these decay by expelling helium. Tallying the elements reveals the time since the minerals formed. The innovative technique may help resolve different models of how the stone spheres formed. Scientists agree that the iron comes from the bone-white Navajo Sandstone layers, stripped bare of their mineral paint by percolating groundwater. A subtle film of hematite, or iron oxide, colors the iconic red cliffs and canyons.

Chemical reactions fused the moqui marbles with iron, but the details haven’t been settled. Some researchers now think tiny microbes spurred the chemical process, and that similar concretions on Mars may one day reveal signs of ancient life.

“The discoveries on Mars helped push us to better understand the setting here on Earth, and what we do on Earth feeds back into helping interpret Mars,” Chan told fox news.

Concretions of all shapes and sizes are found all over the world. The curious rocks have inspired fantastical tales of fairies, meteorites and dinosaur eggs, but their origin is fairly mundane. Water flowing through sedimentary rock leaves behind minerals that glue together masses of sand, mud, or other particles. Sometimes, a treasure — like a bone or a shell — hides inside.

The Moqui marbles crop up in the Navajo Sandstone in Arizona and in Utah’s public lands, eroding from the spectacular white cliffs in Zion National Park and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Collecting concretions in the parks is prohibited.

Red and white Navajo sandstone in Zion National Park

The iron stones appear almost black, with a pitted surface polished by blowing sand. Other rusty structures formed too, including discs, “flying saucers,” pipes and flat plates. Spiritualists have endowed the marbles with “energy” and dubbed the distinctive shapes as male and female, making them among the only rocks with a gender. Quietly sitting and holding one in each hand is said to calm the spirit, just like meditation.

“I don’t believe that,” Chan said. “I do believe these are important resources, and the geologic landscape is our heritage.”

Cloaked in iron

The Navajo Sandstone was once the biggest expanse of dunes on Earth. Its color comes from flakes of iron-rich minerals blown in and buried with the quartz sand. After the dunes were blanketed and buried by younger geologic layers, the iron enrobed the sand grains, giving the Navajo Sandstone its amazing colors and patterns.

Eons later, the moqui marbles were born. The concretions owe their existence to massive tectonic shifts in the Southwest, researchers think. Some 20 million years ago, the Colorado Plateau started to bob up like a cork. The entire plateau has lifted about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers).

The tectonic uplift warped its rock layers, trapping oil and gas. When a mixture of water and natural gas flowed through the Navajo Sandstone, it stripped away the rusty coating, bleaching the rocks from red to creamy white. Chan thinks this iron-rich water crept through the sandstone until it reached a crack, hole, or layer where the water chemistry was different and iron settled out of the water.

The chemical reactions first covered each sand grain with iron, creating tiny spheres. The spheres grew, layer by layer, making contact with others nearby until some spheres connect into one large mass. Collectors on private property sometimes find odd, knobby clumps that appear to be partially formed spheres, where the process may have halted halfway through.

The spheres grew layer by layer, making contact with others nearby until many spheres became one large ball.

“These round concretions have a self-organizing pattern, like people at a party,” Chan said. “The natural pattern is for people to gather together in conversation groups, and the groups are going to be round.”

The results of the new study suggest that the first iron-oxide batch formed 20 million to 25 million years ago, and the next set was added 2 million to 3 million years ago. This younger group matches up with another major event: It’s when the Colorado River started cutting through the Navajo Sandstone near the mouth of the Escalante River, which likely changed groundwater flow through the region. These younger marbles are mostly goethite instead of hematite, which may reflect the changing chemistry of the groundwater.

Iron eaters

The younger ages also support a different model for how the concretions formed, according to David Loope, a geologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who was not involved in the study. Loope thinks the Moqui marbles were transformed by microbes, morphing from one kind of mineral to another as the region’s groundwater chemistry changed.

According to Loope’s model, the marbles were originally siderite, an iron carbonate mineral. The same fluids Chan said had bleached the sandstone deposited the carbonate spheres, only with an added boost of carbon dioxide gas dissolved in the water. When the Colorado River sliced into the Navajo Sandstone 2 million years ago, the groundwater flow and the mineral levels shifted.

The researchers think bacteria helped convert the siderite into hematite. With a powerful microscope, the researchers also discovered tiny structures suggestive of microbial life inside the concretions, similar to tubes seen in Martian meteorites. Some of the hematite rinds resemble siderite crystals — a clue that one mineral ousted the other, Loope, and his colleagues reported in August 2012 in the journal Geology. “We are completely convinced the concretions had siderite precursors,” Loope said.

Link to the past

“Moqui” is a Hopi word that means “dear departed ones.” According to Hopi tradition, spirits of the dead would play with the marbles at night, leaving them behind in the morning to reassure the living that they were happy in the afterlife.

Just as the Moqui marbles embody the Hopi idea of life after death, the iron stones are links to ancient environments on the Colorado Plateau. With the new dating technique, Chan has shown that scientists can start to pinpoint where and when water flowed through rock. The search for historic water routes in the Southwest has engaged researchers for more than century, since the first geologists tried to puzzle out how the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon.

“A lot of people are just fascinated by these concretions, and maybe geologists haven’t been able to take them seriously in the past,” Loope told Fox News. “I think they pretty clearly hold a lot of information.”

A New Unified Model For Cave Pearls: Insights from Cave Pearls in Carlsbad Cavern, New Mexico, U.S.A.

A New Unified Model For Cave Pearls: Insights from Cave Pearls in Carlsbad Cavern, New Mexico, U.S.A.

The Cave of Lechuguilla is the deepest of the Americas, but it is most notable because of its unique shapes, its peculiar geology, and its impermanence.

 Nigel Ball in the Chandelier Ballroom in Lechuguilla Cave Carlsbad Boneyard

Agave lechuguilla, a plant species found near his entrance, is called the cavern. Lechuguilla is located in the National Park of Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico.

Entry to the cave is limited to licensed scientists, survey and excavation teams, and management trips for the national park service.

Lechuguilla Cave offers more than extreme size. It holds a variety of rare speleothems, including lemon-yellow sulfur deposits, 20 feet (6.1 m) gypsum chandeliers, 20 feet (6.1 m) gypsum hairs and beards, 15 feet (4.6 m) soda straws, hydromagnesite balloons, cave pearls, subaqueous helictites, rusticles, U-loops and J-loops.

Lechuguilla Cave surpasses its nearby sister, Carlsbad Caverns, in size, depth, and variety of speleothems, though no room has been discovered yet in Lechuguilla Cave that is larger than Carlsbad’s Big Room.

Scientific exploration has been conducted. For the first time, a Guadalupe Mountains cave extends deep enough that scientists may study five separate geologic formations from the inside.

The profusion of gypsum and sulfur lends support to speleogenesis by sulfuric acid dissolution.

The sulfuric acid is believed to be derived from hydrogen sulfide that migrated from nearby oil deposits.

Therefore this cavern formed from the bottom up, in contrast to the normal top-down carbonic acid dissolution mechanism of cave formation.

Rare, chemolithoautotrophic bacteria are believed to occur in the cave. These bacteria feed on the sulfur, iron, and manganese minerals and may assist in enlarging the cave and determining the shapes of unusual speleothems.

The claim in the BBC documentary series Planet Earth that these bacteria do not derive any energy from the sun is incorrect, as the majority are sulfur-oxidizing bacteria that utilize primarily atmospheric oxygen (derived from sunlight-driven photosynthesis) as an electron acceptor.

Other studies indicate that some microbes may have medicinal qualities that are beneficial to humans.

Lechuguilla Cave lies beneath a park wilderness area. The cave’s passages may extend out of the park into adjacent Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.

A major threat to the cave is proposed gas and oil drilling on BLM land. Any leakage of gas or fluids into the cave’s passages could kill cave life or cause explosions.

Cave pearl

Small, almost spherical concretion of calcite that is formed in a pool of water in a cave and is not attached to the surface on which it forms. Occasionally saturated water drips into small pools with such vigour that a stalagmite cannot form.

A bit of foreign matter may become coated with calcite, and slight movements of the water may keep the bit in motion while new layers of calcite are added. Concentric layers are added and polished in this way until the cave pearl becomes too large to remain in motion and becomes attached.

Cave pearls in the Pearlsian Gulf, Lechguilla Cave.
Lechuguilla cave

Cave pearls in the Pearlsian Gulf, Lechguilla Cave.
The Pearlsian Gulf, Lechguilla Cave. 

An 18th-century ship under the world trade center new york

An 18th-century ship under the world trade center new york

In the midst of this tragic event and chaos, however, cleanups found something amazing in the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC), took place on 11 September 2001.

Archaeologists found the remains of a big boat’s hull underneath the ruins of the Twin Towers in 2010.  Now, scientists have revealed the secrets behind this mysterious vessel.

Underneath the excavation site, the ship was found in the wreckage, some 22 feet (6.7 m) underneath the ground. By gathering samples and testing the wood from the hull of the ship, scientists were able to determine that the hull came from the same era as the Declaration of Independence, in the late 1700s.

Scientists at Columbia’s Tree Ring Lab, who were led by Dr. Martin-Benito, made this determination after comparing the wood’s ring patterns, which were found on the timber of the hull, with those found in the historical record.

The researchers used dendrochronological dating and provenancing to uncover the date of the ships’ production. More specifically, it seems that the ship was built in a Philadelphia shipyard around 1773.

Image of the Hull in the wreckage.

It also seems that the oak timbers that were used to build the ship all originated from the same general region in Philadelphia. Since the timber all comes from the same vicinity, it is likely that the ship was produced by a small shipyard.

Most notably, the researchers found that the rings on the hull match other samples that were taken from Independence Hall, which is the building where the founding fathers signed both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. In the abstract, the authors of the findings report:

After developing a 280-year long floating chronology from 19 samples of the white oak group (Quercus section Leucobalanus), we used 21 oak chronologies from the eastern United States to evaluate absolute dating and provenance.

Our results showed the highest agreement between the WTC ship chronology and two chronologies from Philadelphia (r  =  0.36; t  =  6.4; p < 0.001; n  =  280) and eastern Pennsylvania (r  =  0.35; t  =  6.3; p < 0.001; n  =  280). The last ring dates of the seven best-preserved samples suggest trees for the ship were felled in 1773 CE or soon after.

This finding is notable, as very few ships have been discovered from the latter decades of the 18th Century, and there is very little historical documentation related to how the ships that were produced during this year were constructed.

Consequently, this ship offers us important insights into the history of American shipbuilding.

So, how did the ship get beneath the WTC? It’s actually not as strange as you might think. When Manhattan (where the WTC was located) was first settled, the site lay within the Hudson River.

To clarify, in the 18th century, the current location of the WTC would have been underwater—beneath the Hudson.

Maps and other archival documents clearly detail this data. Obviously, as the settlement became more populated, commercial waterfront space became increasingly desirable and (consequentially) more and more scarce.

As a result, from the mid-1700s until the mid-1800s, the area along the river was increasingly filled in to advance the Manhattan coastline farther into the Hudson.

Historians still aren’t certain whether or not the ship sank accidentally, because of some unintentional mishap, or if it was purposely submerged.

Oftentimes, city planners would use garbage and other debris (like an old ship) to build the foundations of new ground in Manhattan. Essentially, we would make landfills along the Hudson in order to create a buildup that would, ultimately, increase Manhattan’s coastline.

Oysters were also found fixed to the ship’s hull, which suggests that the ship languished in the waters of the Hudson for quite some time before being buried by layers of trash and dirt that (eventually) formed the land upon which the Twin Towers rested.

It is a little ironic that the World Trade Center attack—the historic moment that reshaped much of America’s future—also opened up a door into America’s past.

The Mystery Of Cahokia Mounds, North America’s First City

The Mystery Of Cahokia Mounds, North America’s First City

Long before Christopher Columbus “discovered” North America, the mounds of Cahokia stood tall and formed the continent’s first city in recorded history.

In fact, during its height in the 12th century, Cahokia Mounds was larger in population than London. It spread across six square miles and boasted a population of 10,000 to 20,000 people — vast figures for the time.

But Cahokia’s peak didn’t last long. And its demise remains mysterious to this day.

An illustrated aerial view of Cahokia.

The region has been occupied for the first time around 1200 BC in the late Archaic period but the first inhabitants in the area are thought to have arrived in the late woodland period around AD 600–700.

It is founded around AD 1050 in what is now western Illinois by archaeological evidence.

Cahokia at its peak was the largest urban center north of Central America’s Mesoamerican civilization with a population of 20,000 inhabitants, although the extent of the population at its highest is still disputed.

Monks Mound, the largest manmade pre-Columbian earthen mound in North America.

The city covered an area between six to nine square miles, notably larger than many contemporary European cities such as London, which during the same period was just 1.12 square miles.

The inhabitants constructed 120 earthen mounds, ranging in size and shape from raised platforms, conical, and ridge-top designs that involved moving 55 million cubic feet of earth over a period several decades.

They constructed ceremonial plazas, situated around the mounds that were interconnected with pathways, courtyards and thousands of dwellings made from wattle and daub, with outlying farming villages that supported the main urban centre.

The largest structure at Cahokia is “Monks Mound” (named after a community of Trappist monks who settled on the mound) which is a 290-metre-tall platform with four terraces that was built around AD 900–955.

An 1882 illustration of Monks Mound

The perimeter of the base of Monks Mound measures similar in size to the Great Pyramid of Giza and is notably larger than the base of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

Surrounding the main precinct was a defensive wooden palisade measuring 2 miles in length with watchtowers, that was built around the year AD 1200.

Although there is no archaeological evidence of conflict, some theories suggest that the defences were built for ritual or societal separation rather than for military purposes.

Cahokia began to decline by the 13th century and was mysteriously abandoned around AD 1300-1350.

Scholars have suggested that environmental factors such as flooding, or deforestation led to an exhaustion of natural resources.

In 1982, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) designated the site a World Heritage Site.

How 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck discovery ‘redefined’ history

Archaeology breakthrough: How 2,000-year-old Roman shipwreck discovery ‘redefined’ history

Scuba researchers explored waters in Florida when they came across the shipwreck of a Roman vessel. The ship was called ‘Panarea III,’ and was expected to have sailed between Rome and Carthage about 218-210 AD during the Second Punic War.

In 2010 US archeologists using sonar equipment and a remotely operated submersible find it at 130 meters depth.

In the center of the researchers, the Italian archeologists considered that the ship was a supply vessel in the fleet of the Roman consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus.

Among the stunning artefacts were “small fishing plates, kalathoi, pitcher, and the louterion,” the archaeologists said.

They said the latter was probably used as a sacrificial altar on board the ship.

Jarrod Jablonski, one of the divers, added: “Metal supports still embedded in the base were likely used for fastening to the deck.

Underwater researchers were exploring waters in Florida when they came across the shipwreck of a Roman vessel.

“The Louterion (the ship) is one of many unique discoveries that promise to help redefine what we understand about ancient trade routes and commerce in the 3rd century BC.”

A similar discovery was made in the waters of the Mediterranean when a Phoenician vessel was found by researchers.

The Phoenicians were the direct descendent of the Canaanites of the south Syrian and Lebanese coast – known as a great maritime people who had developed a high level of shipbuilding technology.

It was found at a depth of 125 metres below the surface.

According to Science News, after they find, Dr. Gambin said: “This shipwreck may offer new and significant information about Phoenician seafaring and trade in the central Mediterranean during the archaic period.

“To date, little is known about the earliest contact of Phoenician mariners with the Maltese islands.”

The researchers claimed that the ship was sailing from Sicily to Malta when it sank.

It was about 15 metres long and carried a cargo of 20 grinding stones (about 35 kg each) and 50 amphorae of seven different types – indicating the ship had been indifferent harbours.

Archaeology news: They believe the ship was from Sicily

Dr. Gambin added: “This discovery may be considered as one of the best-preserved archaeological sites in Malta datable to the early Phoenician period.”