So true story. Four hundred years before crystal Ball Cologne reached what he thought was India, I.
Mean Christopher Columbus.
Yeah, oh, crystal Ball, before he did reach this, for centuries and centuries, there was a city with a population similar in size to London right here in North America.
Say what, that's right, Kahokia, not to be confused with the Kloika.
That's different, Yes.
Very very different, very different things. And that's our classic episode for this evening, folks. Once upon a time, Kuika was a enormously prosperous city, the largest of its sort north of Mexico on this continent. And do you guys remember this episode?
Well, I just remember that people seem to have abandoned it and we're not really sure why.
It feels very mysterious to me, Like the entire episode is one big mystery.
It's very Krakatoa thirteen fifty CE. This metropolis was largely abandoned. What happened?
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works?
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our guest super producer Tari So reach out and say hi. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know, a bit of a history episode for us. You guys, we have in the past explored lost civilizations, and we've explored lost cities spoiler alert by the way, there are tons and tons of them around spoiler alert.
We've spoiled Lost and gotten yelled at about it.
It's true, that's true.
That's the thing that happened.
I think Loss spoils itself at the edge. I don't want to throw pot shots at it. But it's a great show.
It really is. But then they remade it into a more fun version and now it's called The Good Place.
You know, you're right, man, never thought about that connection, but it is kind of Not only is it more fun, it's.
Just like a better show. It knows where it's going.
Yeah, yeah, yes.
But they do still wrestle with some of the same philosophical quandaries at the time. I think that's an excellent comparison. One thing that the good Place does not have that Lost does have. It is a collection of inexplicable ruins. You know what I mean? We all look. I'm gonna spoil it because it's one of the coolest parts. Spoiler countdown three, two, one, the foot, where's the body? Why? Why are there only four toes?
Spoiler alert You never find out.
They will never tell you. But but it turns out that they're cleaving the show careers of Lost, or cleaving closer to the truth than you might imagine. The US is often explained in the following way. In comparison to Europe. They'll say, in Europe, two hundred miles is a long way. In the US, two hundred years is a long time. And we often think about this country in terms of the beginning of migration across the ocean, right, So we don't think of all the people who crossed over the
Bearing straight in ancient times. We don't think of the pre Columbian cultures that rose and fell. We think of you know, crystal Ball Colombo selling the Ocean blue.
He sold the Ocean blue. I completely agree.
Crystal Ball Colombo, Crystal bal columb Okay, hmm.
I was like, I am not aware of this pronunciation.
I like it.
It's it's a new series that Damon Lindtoff and I and jj Abrams are working on.
Yeah, And he's just a detective and he's going around looking at land. He's like a he's a purveyor of land.
He looks at the land and he turns and walks away, and then he says, actually more to this land than meets the eye.
My wife and what Yeah, it's your wife and a bunch of native people.
Right right in this in this idea, of course, Crystabal Colombo is solving the crimes that he himself commits.
There we go easy.
It's it's essentially memento comparisons have been made. But right, it would be it would be apt for this fictional character to look at the land, turn around and come back and say, actually, there's a lot more to it, to your example, Noel, Because for a long long time, we we were sold a myth in this country, we being the people of what we call the United States, we were told that there was this vast, sparsely populated
continent rich in all sorts of resources. You want timber boom, you want salmon boom.
All you have to do is go out there in the frontier and capture it. It's waiting for you.
Right right, manifest that destiny. For centuries, the history of North America was largely ignored or actively suppressed by European
powers exploring and colonizing the continent. Nations on the eastern side of the Atlantic overwhelmingly depicted North America this way, a land of exoticism and opportunity, and they ardently and purposely suppressed the fact that this continent was already home to a massive assortment of sophisticated, pre existing cultures who would have been just fine without European intervention and all
the disease and degradation that it brought along with it. So, if this myth of empty North America is indeed false, what do we know about it? Like, what are the facts?
Oh sure? I mean, prior to any Europeans showing up on North American land, there were one hundred and twelve million people already living somewhere on the continent. And you know, lower estimates do range to as little as eight million people from that one hundred and twelve million, So there is a range because it's not known the exact number of people. There's no census, there's no any way of
telling how many different peoples. You can you can tell how many different well, at least close to however, many different cultures essentially exist just from finding things, but knowing the exact number of people is very, very difficult.
Right right. The one thing we do know is that there were millions of people, yes, and they weren't all just sort of strolling around so as many one hundred and twelve million people of fourteen ninety two, but by sixteen fifty that population had already plummeted to less than six million. The people living at the height of pre European history had extensive trade networks, They had rich cultural lives, they had cities, they had internal and external warfare, conflict cooperation,
all the things that Europe was doing. And they had dense urban areas, which is something that may surprise a lot of people listening right. Normally, when you think of pre European populations, we think of people living a perhaps nomadic existence in some areas of the continent. We think of complex cave dwellings, perhaps, but we don't think of a London, you know, or we don't think of a Berlin.
So at least, yeah, an early version of that with structures and highly organized societ existing within these structures.
So we would like to introduce you to one of the largest known pre European cities in the on the continent at the time, a place called Kahokia.
So in its prime, about four centuries before our boy Colombo stumbled onto the Western hemisphere, walked away, and then decided to come back.
And you know, dig a little deeper.
Kahokia was a prosperous pre American city with a population very similar to London. Archaeological data showed that agricultural settlements first appear in the area around four hundred a d. And then in ten fifty AD you had a boom population boom at Cokiya, which became a major political and cultural center, with the population booming into the tens of thousands.
Yeah, and you know, when you think about something like this, it's hard to imagine that it could exist anywhere near current civilization, righty, Oh, that must be out in the middle of nowhere somewhere, right, because we would know all about that. We would people in the United States would travel there to explore the remains or something, right, sure, But no it was located very close to present day Saint Louis.
Yeah, it's about eight miles out of Saint Louis. It's located in southern Illinois. This was, by all measures that we can find, the largest North American city north of Mexico. At the time. It had been built by a group of people known as the Mississippians. These were native people who occupied a large swath of the present day southeastern US from the Mississippi River to the shores of the Atlantic.
This city, Gohokia, was sophisticated, it was cosmopolitan, but today its history is virtually unknown, not to just most of the current US residents, but even two people who live in the area, present day residents of Illinois, Illinoisians. Illinoisians. Oh no, I hope that's not Illinoising. Oh wow, not worth it.
Just throw us in the trash.
It's this is one of those stories that was bypassed in favor of that dominant narrative that we see reinforced in literature, we see reinforced in in cinema. Yeah right, And it's the idea that the people who lived here before Europeans ever arrived were somehow less learned, which is clearly not the case. And there's a guy named Thomas Emerson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, who
had an interesting quote. A lot of the world, he says, is still relating in terms of cowboys and you know, quote unquote Indians with feathers and teepees and whatnot. But in a D one thousand, from the beginning Cochy, it was laid out to a specific plan. It doesn't grow into a plan. It starts at as a plan with a purpose. They created the most massive earthen mounds in North America. Where does that come from? This is a good question, It's a really good question. And weirdly enough,
we're looking for cities to compare this to. Well. Hear that it bore some similarities to London, right, but in some ways it was like Manhattan.
Yeah, it's true.
It was home to multiple groups of people from across the lands of the Mississippians. Groups included the Natchez, the Pensacola, the Choctaw, the Ofo my personal favorite, I don't know because I've never really heard the name before, and I like saying Opho.
It's fun.
Archaeologists conducting strontium tests on the teeth of buried remains. Have found that a third of the population was not from Gokia but somewhere else. And this is according to Emerson, who is the director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey.
Yeah, we know that the residents of this city, the people who lived in the city center and the people who lived on the outskirts, they did city people things. Yeah, we have forensic traces, archaeological evidence really of their farming, trading, and hunting efforts. And we know that they also had urban planners. And these urban planners used astronomical alignments to lay out a low scale metropolis that ranged, as you said, Matt, from ten to twenty thousand people. And they planned it
again from the beginning. The cities between six and nine square miles in area. Inside its borders. As close as we can estimate, they're about one hundred and twenty earthen mounds. And one thing we know for sure is the mound building technology was pretty demanding. This was backbreaking work. We're talking about stacking. We're digging first off, digging, hauling and stacking.
Because these mounds are underground dwellings or structures. Essentially, it's like a place to go into. Right, it's a when you imagine it, I guess in your head, I think it is ben because of the growing up I guess being shaped sometimes by these European ideas of what the
United States is. You don't even have a real understanding of what a mound is when we're talking about them, you know, like and just talking about how difficult it is to create a single dwelling place or a building that would be used for any kind of function, Like it's You're absolutely right, how difficult that would be.
A lot of these are tombs as well, and by hand. This community stacked fifty five million cubic feet of earth and oh they as far as we know, they did it just using woven baskets to transport it. The largest mound, which is later called the Monks Mound after the French trap is too tended to it in the eighteen hundreds, was the site of a sizeable building where the city's political and spiritual leaders met. It was surrounded by a
wooden palisade almost two miles in circumference. The town center was where residents, pilgrims, and leaders worshiped and held ceremonies which will be very important later on. Right now, if we picture the city, think of it the way that you know, a lot of modern cities are there's a downtown area and a lot of people will travel there for work, for leisure lisiu or you know, maybe to attend certain events, cultural events.
But just in a short term essentially.
Right, they won't live there, you know. So this city is no different. Most of the Mississippians live on the other side of this palisade in these single room homes you were talking about, Matt the rectangular they're about fifteen feet long, twelve feet wide. We know this based on what we were able to to dig up that wooden
post walls covered with mats, thatched roofs. Far from being a collection of villages or campsites, they were linked with their own network of courtyards and pathways, kind of the way streets are laid out.
Yeah, and you know there would be physical connections like you're saying, that actually connect everything together. The different individual homes have that feeling. It's again so uncharacteristic of the way sometimes it's depicted, or a way maybe we imagine in our minds of what a Native American city could be like.
So we've laid out a bit of the architecture, we've laid out a bit of this street planning, we've learned a little bit about the inhabitants. This leads us to the next question. Where is Kahokia now? Nowadays? There's nothing. There's a series of mounds right.
Yep, and there's a I mean, that's about it. There's some ruins and maybe a little bit of evidence left that there was human activity that occurred in and around these mounds.
Because you see the metropolis of Cohokia, thousands and thousands of people, as near as we can tell one day, disappeared by thirteen fifty, was largely abandoned by its people, and even today in twenty nineteen, no one knows why.
And we're going to find out, at least what we know at this point. After a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy.
Well, first of all, let's say, let's talk about what we know. It wasn't that caused the disappearance of all the humans at Hokia, not the usual suspects, things like war or maybe a disease that came through, because some Europeans came through. Because we're talking thirteen fifty before fourteen ninety two, right before some of the early early early landings, So we don't we know, it's not that and European
Conquest doesn't have anything with it. Nobody came through, like you know, Hernando de Soto, because this guy was probably the first person to actually make it to Kokia, right, and he didn't arrive until fifteen forty that's crazy, almost two hundred years after it had just been you know, disappeared.
He looks like he snoozed and he losed I guess.
So, yeah, it's true. By the time De Soto and Co. Would have which is another show that we're pitching on, this DeSoto and yeah, yeah, we're doing a shared universe of European explorers and we're we're adapting, we're adapting it to modern tastes. So we've got our detective show. M hmm, Crystal Ball, Colombo, De Soto and Co.
Is what is that?
Just like a buddy comedy, I want to say, yeah, and Co being like maybe his faithful man servants.
There we go, tell us who should play these roles? By the way, you know, there's a lot of talent out there.
I think Matt Barry would make a really good DeSoto.
Oh, yes, I could see that.
Who could be? Who could be? Faithful man servants?
M Well, let's let's give this the time it deserves. Let's speak about that.
Yeah, let's let it marinate a little bit more, and let's make some T shirts.
And let's make some T shirts. Yes, yes, surely Matt Barry will be fine with that.
I want Yeah.
Now I'm now I'm wondering, who's like a hot TV actor?
Now, I don't people like that show scandal a lot? Who's in that? I don't know either.
I don't watch TV anymore.
Let us know.
Let us know who is on TV?
Who is on who is on TV? Today? And would they be a good co for DeSoto and Co. It's strange, though, because he would have seen this empire in decline. He would not have seen the glory days, the vast parades right, the grand ceremonies, the hunting parties. He would have instead seen ruins and mounds. Many of the civilization's villages, the Mississippians were established near trade routes or sources of water
and food, but Kahokia, like Atlanta, was different. It had plenty of resources, but it was not built on ideal land. What we mean when we say Kokia was similar to Atlanta is the following picture. In your country or your neck of the global woods, the biggest cities, the biggest cities in your area. In many cases, if you're talking about the biggest cities in the country, they will be
built along sources of water. You know they'll be There will be a city by the bay, there will be a city by right, things like that, a city by a gigantic lake or coast or a coast exactly. And in the case of Atlanta, there is a river called the Chattahoochee that is in the area. But our real transports, our real sources of transit are man made. The world's busiest airport, that's a river of people and goods. We still have train lines those for a long time replace
the role of rivers. Kahokia did have a ton of resources, timber, fish, that all that jazz, thanks to their position around these two rivers in their area. But they were built on land that was prone to flooding, which makes us wonder why build something there at all, much less a teeming metropolis.
Well, there seems to be at least somewhat of an explanation, and it has to do with being able to travel from various places easily, especially if you were to get on the water to travel to this place, almost as if it was meant to be a place to go in the same way that the downtown was set up, almost like something that you temporarily go to and then leave and go back home. Like the entire city. Was that almost a pilgrimage city where all the Mississippians could gather for big events.
A destination. Yeah right, yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. So according to Emerson, again, it may have been a good area to explore, but not so good to live in because you know, flooding.
Yeah yeah, no, nobody likes that.
So something changed around a D one thousand. According to Emerson's that boom we mentioned earlier, it becomes this major city center. But most of the change doesn't have to do with the economy, at least according to the experts. Now, most of it has to do with what we could in general call religion. So we don't know a lot of the specifics, but we do know that the city may have been built primarily for these sacred gatherings and ceremonies.
What do we mean when we say sacred gatherings and ceremonies, we don't mean it's all pretty.
Yeah.
So, archaeological work has also uncovered a mound containing mass burials. While the extent of this is still being debated, it appears that the Mississippians may have conducted a little bit of light ritual human sacrifice, just a touch a dash of human sacrifice. And that is judging by what appears to be Okay, it's not so light. Hundreds of people, mostly young women, buried in these mass graves. Some of
them were likely strangled, others possibly were bled out. Four men were found with their heads and hands cut off. Another burial pit, mostly males, had been clubbed to death, and researchers have found no specific evidence of any kind of influence of warfare or invasion from outsiders.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's that's rough. And that's again why Ben was saying something we could consider religion. Right, It's not necessarily a belief that was held by everyone, but there was at least a group of people at that Ciny center that was killing people.
Well into Nole's point there, it is crucial that we recognize these were not nothing indicates that these were prisoners of war.
Yeah, you know what I mean, like the hands, the guys with their hands cut off and right and all that.
Yeah, nothing indicates that would be a situation similar to Apocalypto or as Mesoamerican civilization is portrayed Apocalypto. Do you guys remember that movie?
I remember it existed, I did not see it. I think I already written off Mel Gibson at that point.
Oh, hadn't already had some weird racist outburst by then?
Let's see, I can't remember.
It's hard to keep track.
Which is sad?
Right he has he made a comeback.
I don't think so. No, I think he's just because he is.
He still canceled.
I believe so, man, I believe so. He called some he called some law enforcements some terrible things. He's pretty virulently anti Semitic.
Does that mean Passion of the Christ is canceled too?
I don't know. I still you know that's Have you guys seen it now?
I know I never wanted to.
I watched the Satan shows up, so I watched the Satan clips predictably, but I haven't seen the whole thing. And uh me and my ex used to sit around and we'd have the DVD. This is back when DVD's were a thing, and then we would always ask ourselves, is tonight the night? You know, we were making dinner, we want to watch him? Is this the night? Where we watched Passion in the Christ not exactly a date film, And we went for years asking ourselves if tonight was
the night? Eventually we had planned we said, you know what, we're never going to watch this. We're going to get a bunch of stickers that say is tonight the night, and then we're going to go to Best Buy and we're going to stick them on Passion of the Christ ds. Pretty funny, I mean, is tonight the night? Is a great sticker to put on stuff?
But you just specifically sought out the Satan scenes on YouTube. Yeah, you didn't see the bludgeoning or the meaning or the anything.
I wanted to see how they handled infernal powers and it was pretty spooky.
Isn't he just kind of like a grizzled old man.
It's if I remember correctly, it's a very very pale, hairless, feminine looking That's pretty cool. I like that look for the old devil spooky, spooky stuff. But Mel Gibson aside. In Apocalypso you will see depictions of hunting parties gathering people from different tribes outside of the city center, abducting them and using them as victims of you know, in
a ritual sacrifice. This appears to be a situation where in the government of the city was sacrificing its own people, which you know, without it's tricky for us to ascribe the motives there because we don't know why they were doing it. You know, we don't know if it was tied to maybe a seasonal or a turn of the seasons, or a harvest cycle. We don't know if it was meant to be an appeasement to some sort of divine force.
Maybe you're sacrificing people to the river, you know what I mean, I just made that up.
I don't know. Well, yeah, again, like you could, you could feasibly imagine that it would be to prevent the rivers from flooding again, right from the land from flooding. I can totally imagine. That. Doesn't mean it is real or actually happened, but I can I can see why you would want to do that or go to those lengths to prevent a mass so flood from occurring.
There's another I think you pointed out earlier in that these people did not all die in the same manner. So there's another archaeologist, a guy named William I. Isminger, who is the assistant manager at the Kokuia Mounds, who posits that there must have, if not involved in sacrifice, there must have been some sort of external threat, whether it was from a local source or whether it was
from something very far away. Because the city was raised and rebuilt four times between eleven seventy five and twelve seventy five. So imagine the city, the biggest city close to you as you're listening. Imagine that city collapsing and being rebuilt four times over one hundred years. We don't have a ton of cities like that here in the US. We do have Atlanta, which was burned to the ground, but that happened once.
Okay.
I don't want to keep harving on this, but is it I just wonder if you guys think it's possible that it was some kind of massive flooding though would occur, because I can imagine that happening four times in one hundred years, where the entire area of floods and you have to rebuild everything. I mean, I can imagine it.
It's a good hypothesis, you know, because Asminger is not definitive on his opinion on the mysterious collapse of Kahokia. He says, maybe they were never attacked, but there was a threat there, and then leaders felt the need to expend a tremendous amount of time, labor, and material to protect this central ceremonial area, you know what I mean.
And then, as we said, after reaching its population height ten to twenty thousand people, in about eleven hundred, the population shrinks and by thirteen fifty it's gone kaiser SoSE style, did they sauce Land's resources? Were they victims of social upheaval where they finally attacked? Where their droughts? Was their climate change? Or to your point, Matt, did the waters rise?
We'll find out after a quick word from our sponsor.
Did the waters rise one time too many? That's the question.
So to uncover the clues to the city's fate, a research team led by the University of Wisconsin Madison geographers Samuel Munoz and Jack Williams performed laser diffraction particle size analysis on sediment samples from Horsesoe Lake and Oxbow Lake near Kahoka, and that is just a shape of a type of lake. The samples yielded evidence of eight different
separate flood events over the past two thousand years. Drought, over exploitation of these resources, and human conflict of all been thrown in the mix as far as reasons are concerned behind the end of Gohoikia, But an earlier study of sediments from Horseshoe Lake suggested that major flooding had occurred in the area around twelve hundred.
So that would be right around right after the peak population.
Yeah, ooh, okay, okay. Now now I'm getting a bigger picture about just getting the peak of population and then something coming by and it being that much more catastrophic.
Yeah. The team analyzed sediments from another lake that was one hundred and twenty miles or for the rest of the world, one hundred and ninety kilometers downstream of Horseshoe Lake, and they found that there was conformation of some sort of catastrophic flood. The Mississippi River rose more than ten meters that's thirty three feet, and they believe it played a critical role in the total abandonment of Cohokia within
one hundred and fifty years. This kind of stuff is happening in the modern day, you know what I mean, on monsoon planes. There are people who are continually building their houses, rebuilding them, evacuating when the waters rise. But although that is a very strong set of clues, it's
not a definitive thing, you know what I mean. Oh yeah, But we have to say, for all intents and purposes, at this point, the mystery remains unsolved, and the strongest indicator is probably flooding, that the city became flooded one too many times. But whatever the case, Gohokio was largely ignored by Europeans and later Americans because it didn't jibe
with that official narrative. It was physical proof of a sophisticated, rich, dense urban culture existing for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, and its existence was something that a lot of Europeans didn't want people to know. And as a matter of fact, when Europeans came, a lot of native people didn't know what was going on. They would say, hey, what's that? What is that? Gigantic, massive series of Mounds, and they would shrug and say, I don't know, it's always been there.
Yeah, this is ghosts of the past. Essentially, you guys.
Can interuper one second, ask a really important question. Yeah, Almond Joy or Mounds?
Which one do? They both have? Coconut?
No coconut? What about you? I prefer Almond Joy. I like to have a little crunch in my coconut chocolate bar. What's the difference Mounds? Well, there's the song.
It's sometimes you feel like a nuts, sometimes you don't. Almond Joy has gotten nuts. Mounds don't.
Oh, they just happened to have lots of bodies with their hands and feed Come.
Oh my gosh, I got there, you got there, you got there. This also, this also inspires me. This has nothing to do with our episode, but it's a great question. Should favorite candy bar least favorite? What?
And why?
I think zero was.
About to say zero, that's the worst one.
It's the worst one. It's the worst candy bar.
White chocolate is pretty garbage in general on its son, unless it's like used as an accent piece and another thing.
Sure, sure why white chocolate shouldn't be just on its own, But also zero bars are somehow offensive to the palatine. It's so funny.
I knew you were going to see bar.
You know what's up man, I don't know that I've ever had one of those.
Oh sweet summer child.
Must be nice for you two have yet not been tainted.
This explains why you're always so happy.
I know. Hey, I'm just eating hundred grands all the time.
Hundred grand is Now that's a top bar for me. Hunder Grand's the top bars, quality bar. Big fan of a what you might call it?
Oh yeah, I remember those?
Remember those had a coal commercial in the nineties too that did Yeah, kind of a claimation situation.
Going on Tolboro and yes or no all day.
I like Toberon. I like the way it snaps. Yeah, I don't know what's but I like it dark chocolate to what is that? Is it toffee that's inside the.
Little I think?
Yeah?
Yeah so anyway, so yeah, yeah, let let us know. Also shout out to Netli Crunch. It's it's it's pretty. I think it's nostalgia that makes me like it.
You know, are we changing the what we're gonna start doing on this show every week?
Just talk.
I'm enjoying this.
This is a good This is a good question. Also, I have it on fairly solid authority that other countries are absolutely smashing the US out of the water in the candy bar game. No way, yes, way, Ted, all right, but but yes, going back, it's true. We've seen this time and time and time again. Long time listeners, you know that despite what our species propagates about itself in film and in literature, we're actually terrible at whole holding
on to anything or remembering anything. We lose entire civilizations. We have no idea, We have no idea where why some civilizations just stopped. We can guess, we can make very good, educated guesses, but often we're coming to the game very very late, because our predecessors did not want
to have the question answered. You know, we're talking about explorers on the African continent who, when they were explorers from Europe rather who would find these ornate ruins and then say something like, well, clearly some other Europeans been here before.
Yeah, or there was some unknown race of humanity that came down from the stars or from inside the earth and created this.
It's definitely lizard people.
Yeah. I mean nine out of ten times you're looking at lizards.
Yep, So let's jump to like, Okay, we've known humanity has known about these mounds for quite a while. We've known they have existed, these weird mounds. They're just out there. But it wasn't until the nineteen sixties, the nineteen sixties that the burial mounds there in the place of where Khokia was got protected status.
Right, Yeah, that's correct. And before the nineteen sixties it was the site of a lot of heavy development. Many of the mounds were not all of them, but many were destroyed. They were leveled for farming, right or to become airfields. People built houses and highways on them. And currently you can go see this place. It's about eight
miles out of Saint Louis. You can go visit this ancient loss city and explore conjecture for yourself about what led twenty thousand people to vanish from it, you know, in a very short time span.
You can go to Kahokia dot org, which is c A h O K I A M O U N d S dot org if you want to learn more specifically about how to get there and.
Everything, and this if this is for some of this, this is our first time hearing about this, this sounds amazing. A lost civilization in the heart of the United States. Who wouldn't want to learn more about this story, Who wouldn't want to lend a hand solving the mystery? It might be surprised. Currently about two hundred and fifty thousand people visit this site every year. In comparison, about four million people visit the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis. So
there's probably not going to be a line. Yeah, you should be okay, And that's that's the thing that leads us to another another topic we don't have time to explore on today's show. How many other things like this are out here. So Georgia, the state in which our podcast is base, has a rich pre Columbian history all its own. A lot of people aren't aware of it. As a matter of fact, the building in which we record this show sits atop an ancient sacred spring.
You guys heard about this, right, I thought you were going to say Indian burial ground.
That would explain so much, right, Yeah, there's a there's a cistern hidden in the tower of the Pond City Market building and it still collects water from an ancient sacred spring that was driven underground. History is a palimpsest, which I think we've said before on the show. So a palump sest is palm sest is a weird thing, but a great comparison. Back when paper was much much more expensive and time consuming and rare, people wouldn't just throw away a sheet of paper if they needed to
write something down. They would erase the previous information and right over it. But because of the way they wrote, we can still see what was there before because there are indentations in the paper, And that's a lot like studying history. We're not looking at the stuff written on top. We're digging deeper. That's what the show is all about. And the strangest thing is we never quite seem to get to the bottom.
And we probably won't ever. We're gonna be making this show for the next two hundred years. This whole studio is gonna flood four times the next hundred years.
Well, thankfully, it's all sort of like a mini Noah's Ark kind of situation. Yeah, keep you described it as the shipping continna, but it really is. It probably would just rise with the waters. Yeah, you can just continue podcasting atop the high seas.
Tarry, Are you gonna be okay to just keep it rolling while all that's happening? Yeah, she's yeah, she says. Uh. Oh, she said, of course I got this.
A big yes.
Sorry. Is so cool, you guys. But she did not sign up for a catastrophic flood, right she could?
Che can handle.
I guess most people don't.
Yeah, exactly.
There are very few people who are like, oh, man, can't wait, I'm so I'm so.
Hype unless you live in Miami.
Oh gosh, that's right, that's right, you have family there. We hope that you enjoyed this brief exploration of the mystery of Kohokia. As Matt said, you can visit their website for more information. And we would like to hear from you. What are the what are the forgotten monuments or ruins in your neck of the woods. We talked a little bit about what was built upon ancient sites
here in Georgia. With just one example, I imagine there are hundreds, if not thousands, of even better, more explicit examples, and we want to know yours.
Yeah, and have you ever been to Mississippian culture mound structure anywhere or a series of mounds anywhere. Have you been to some of the mounds in Georgia or just wherever you live? We want we want to know your experience and if you've heard anything else that we should learn about, or a whole maybe a whole nother podcast we should make about that specific culture or location. Please find us on Facebook or Instagram, where we are Conspiracy
Stuff and Conspiracy Stuff Show. We're also on Twitter hanging out over there. But let's just, you know, everybody just try and be nice on Twitter. Okay, let's everybody be nice. Most of y'all are super.
Cool people not being nice on Twitter, Matt, I've.
Just noticed on Twitter lately there's been a lot of niceness really, just Twitter at large or our Twitter. It's just very opinionated, that's all I think. Okay, So if you don't want to do that stuff, find us on our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy, where we have the best mods on the planet. Shout out to you guys.
People get cranky on there sometimes too, but it's.
Okay again, those mods hold us down. Let's see what else we got.
You can check out me and Ben's Instagrammy's if you want to. I'm at Embryonic Insider. I'm at Ben Bolin, Matt, I believe you are at Kim Kardashian.
Where is it, Kylie Jenner?
I don't know what it is this week.
You are at the Famous Egg.
That's it. That's it. I'm an egg. Find me like my posts, heart them whatever you do on Instagram.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to find online.
Find this at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Facebook X and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok. We're Conspiracy Stuff.
Show call our number. It's one eight three three st d WYTK.
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