Ed Barnhart: observation

Transcript context

…The Mound Builders, what was that society like in comparison to everything else we’ve been talking about in Mesoamerica [inaudible 02:50:41]. They evolved over thousands of years. We call them Mound Builders. This is something I object to. I think we should have a better… We do. The last version of them, we call them Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys Mound Builders, but what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now, and they didn’t build them out of stone. That’s kind of our just inherent western bias. Something that’s built out of stone is sophisticated, and something that’s built out of dirt is rudimentary. But in their full living form, they did have cores of dirt, but then they also had kind of clay caps. So they had terraces. They had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. There’s the biggest of the Mississippian cities is called Cahokia, and it’s right outside of St. Louis. And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic, a thriving metropolis. And we in America have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had five to 10,000 people each. Were they their own thing or was there some kind of thread connecting all of them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.