Drone survey reveals large earthwork at ancestral Wichita site in Kansas

[wnylib]

4. Oh, yeah. Cahokia, as the article says,

is the largest known one north of Mexico. Some other centers are thought to be more ceremonial than residential, although they would have required a large number of people to build the earthworks that exist at them.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Native Americans in North America, prior to Columbus, were not nomadic hunter gatherers. They lived in small villages and larger towns (and a few cities) and depended on the crops they grew, fish from local lakes and streams, and meat from animals they trapped or hunted on expeditions.

Since they didn't rotate crops, most of the people in the northeastern woodland areas moved their villages about every 20 years to a new spot nearby, keeping the village name, or sometimes giving it a new name.

They lacked the technology of the Europeans, but had some pretty sophisticated social organization and governments. They became less settled and more nomadic as they were displaced from their territories and villages and towns by European settlements.

People of the Plains and the Great Basin were nomadic prior to Columbus because on the Plains they followed bison herds and in the desert and Basin regions, there were insufficient food sources to survive without moving about. But those nomadic Plains hunters and Basin and desert people were not typical of most Native Americans.