"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 4 - People Of The River" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

Mississippian culture flourished from roughly a.d. 700 to a.d. 1500.
During that time, the largest earthen structures in North America were
built, mounds a hundred feet high and containing over 21,000,000 cubic
feet of earth.

The domestication of corn gave the Mississippians a high-energy food
resource and heightened the carrying capacity of the land. "Probably
for the first time in North American prehistory, people could reliably
produce an annual surplus of food. This surplus resulted in a
population explosion. Village size went from a few hundred people to
perhaps ten or twelve thousand. The diet became almost 90 percent
corn. This stable economic base provided the conditions necessary for
social stratification. Powerful chiefs arose and consolidated the
scattered villages into vast chiefdoms whose tribute to the Great Sun
Chief--a tax--funded widespread communal activities. Labor became
specialized. Certain artisans produced magnificent arrow points, ax
heads, shell beads, and perhaps the very special pottery that was
traded over thousands of miles.

Mississippians established trade routes that spanned the continent,
bringing olivella shells from Florida, obsidian from the Yellowstone
region of the Rocky Mountains, alligator and sharks' teeth from the
Gulf Coast, copper from Ontario, Canada, and Wisconsin, silver from
Michigan, grizzly bear teeth from Montana, conch shells from the
Carolinas, mica and quartz crystals from Virginia, chalcedony from the
Dakotas, pipestone from Ohio and Pennsylvania. They may have even
traded with the high civilizations of Mexico.

From Archaic roots--as is evidenced by the Poverty Point site in
Louisiana--Mississippians inherited, and then improved on,.a body of
mathematical and astronomical knowledge that allowed them to plan their
towns with a standard unit of measurement and to align each of their
mounds according to solar and stellar positions. At Cahokia, in
Illinois, the mounds were arranged so that it was possible for them to
chart the exact position of the sun when it rose and set on the equinox
and solstice. At Toltec Mounds in Arkansas, they knew the azimuths of
Vega, Aldebaran, Rigel, Fomalhaut, Canopus, and Castor, and built their
towns and ceremonial centers accordingly.

The Mississippians understood the basic principles of celestial
mechanics. For example, they observed that the full moon always rises
at precisely the same time the sun sets, which is why the lunar disk is
completely illuminated. They charted the 18.6-year lunar cycle and
positioned their mounds so that the time the moon reached its most
southerly position in that cycle could be ascertained.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Mississippian peoples knew
more about astronomy than does the average modern-day American.

So, we must ask, given the sophistication of their culture, what