Cahokia
The largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico: at its height around 1100 it held perhaps twenty thousand people, more than London at the time. Monks Mound has a larger base than the Great Pyramid. Mound 72 contained a burial with over fifty young women laid out in rows, almost certainly sacrificed. By 1350 the city was empty, for no clear reason, and it has never been explained.
Lake Fundudzi
The sacred lake of the Venda people in northern South Africa, one of the country's few natural freshwater lakes, formed by an ancient landslide. Nobody approaches the water without the chief's permission, and the lake is properly viewed with one's back to it, through the legs. Tradition places a guardian white crocodile in it, and a drowned village on the bottom whose people refused hospitality to a leper.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first.