In the lectures this week I was surprised about the amount of knowledge that had been left out of my previous historical education. Especially when it came to the mound building groups in the Mississippi Valley. That part of history took place in an extremely close geographical proximity and over a vast amount of time but I have heard so little about the civilizations themselves. The population being the same as London at the time which I have learned so much about was extremely shocking, not to mention that the Cahokia populated the largest city in the United States up til the revolution. I am interested in learning more about the extensive trading networks between groups in the area and how far the trade networks reached between the cultures with different political structures.
The idea of the "collapse" of these civilizations is something I would have liked to discuss further. It is obvious that there was not a distinct collapse in many cases. Perhaps a better word for it would be an evolution and this is something that our society should consider. These people seem to have seen that their lifestyle was no longer sustainable and chose to adapt to their surroundings and begin again in different areas with different structures. It also seemed to take a much longer amount of time for these civilizations to get to the point where they needed to change, possibly showing that these ancient groups of people that we refuse to include in our common knowledge of history were more civilized and knowledgable than our society today.
2 comments:
I have to agree. The information in this class has really been surprising since I am a history major and there seems to be so little talk in the other history classes on the people that inhabited this country before the landing of Columbus.
I was also surprised at the lack of information I had been given in previous history classes. When I was attending Fresno City College in Fresno, CA in 2005, I took an American History class that took pride in a goal of opening students' eyes to the lies they had been told all through high school. The section on Christopher Columbus and Native American history was truly shocking to me and made me feel like my previous history classes had been doing some elaborate cover-up when it comes to discussing Native American history. I can understand why some things were not discussed in prior history classes because new discoveries are constantly being made but it seems that sites of historical interests that are as close as the Cahokia Mounds really should have been addressed. Historical sites in Europe and South America are important for us to know but why leave out the sites that are close enough for us to actually get to experience? It is also infuriating how historians and many teachers present Columbus and the early white settlers as heroes coming to American to save this land and Native American people from themselves. It is very misleading to students with such impressionable minds and I'm sure wreaks havoc with Native American childrens' view of themselves and their ancestors.
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