They carved spirals into the cliffs
but only sunlight could reveal the meaning.

This wasn’t just art.

It was memory… triggered by shadow.

Across the Southwest, ancient Americans built petroglyphs that only appear on certain days.

Some still whisper today.

🧵 In Chaco Canyon, on a butte rising 400 feet above the desert, three slabs of sandstone lean against a cliff.

Behind them, a carved spiral.

At noon on the summer solstice, a sliver of sunlight pierces through landing on the center of the spiral.

This is the Sun Dagger.

Fajada Butte, NM
Dated use: ca. 1000–1300 AD

For most of the 20th century, you weren’t allowed to say humans were in the Americas before 13,000 years ago.

Not in textbooks.
Not in grant proposals.
Not in classrooms.

They called it “settled science.”

But the land kept proving them wrong.

🧵 Long before Clovis points showed up on the Plains, there were tools beneath ash in Mexico.

Bones with cut marks in the Yukon.

Deep charcoal layers in Pennsylvania rock shelters.

Each one told the same story:
The First Americans didn’t come late. They came early.

The Missouri River used to wander.
It didn’t flow….it sprawled.

A vast, braided wilderness of shifting sandbars, oxbow lakes, flood-fed forests, and back channels stretching miles wide.

Then we straightened it.

And we’ve been paying for that ever since.

🧵 Before dams and levees, the Missouri was one of the most unpredictable rivers on Earth.

It carved new routes every flood season.

It devoured towns.
It built islands overnight…..then erased them the next spring.

To early settlers, it was chaos.
To Native nations, it was kin.

“Hobby Lobby’s Robby Hobby”

In 2010, @HobbyLobby began quietly buying ancient artifacts.

Cuneiform tablets, clay bullae, biblical fragments.

No paperwork.
No questions.

They said it was for a museum.

It became one of the largest antiquities scandals in U.S. history.

🧵 Between 2010 and 2011, Hobby Lobby bought over 5,500 ancient artifacts….cuneiform tablets, clay seals, and sacred relics through dealers in the UAE and Israel.

Most had been looted from Iraq, stripped from the ruins of war.

The shipments were disguised.

Customs forms read:

“Handmade tile samples.”

No export licenses.
No provenance.

Just stolen history….boxed and mailed to Oklahoma.

In 1919, archaeologists opened a pit at a forgotten mound site in Wisconsin.

They didn’t find burials.
They found a crime scene.

Dozens of human remains.
Most headless.
Burned. Dismembered.
Tossed in trash pits with deer bones and ash.

This was no battlefield.

This was Aztalan.

🧵 Aztalan wasn’t a village.
It was a Mississippian frontier outpost built around 1000 AD.

It had:

– Platform mounds
– A central ceremonial plaza
– High palisade walls
– Sacred fire basins
– Burned charnel structures

250 miles north of Cahokia
But unmistakably connected.

They said we arrived here 13,000 years ago.

A single fluted spearpoint in mammoth bones….that was our origin story.

Clovis First.
Taught for 60 years.
Still believed by many.

But it was wrong.
And we’ve known it for a long time.

🧵 The unraveling of Clovis: Clovis points are beautiful.
Symmetrical. Deadly. Etched with intent.

They appear across the continent.

New Mexico.
Nova Scotia.
Idaho.
Florida.

A sudden bloom of genius.
Then… nothing.

No villages. No temples. No trace.

Just tools.
And silence.

In 1838, the U.S. government signed an order making it legal to kill Mormons.

This wasn’t frontier myth.
This was law.

A governor’s signature.
A war between neighbors.
And one of the darkest chapters in Missouri history.

Let’s talk about the Mormon War. 🧵 The Latter-day Saints (Mormons) began settling in Missouri in the 1830s driven by prophecy, persecution, and land.

Locals didn’t take kindly to them.

They voted in blocs. Bought land in clusters. Spoke of “Zion.”

To Missourians, it sounded like a takeover.

Two utopias were born here.
Both collapsed.

First the Harmonists. Then the Owenites.

Secret societies. Enlightenment experiments. Ancient stone labyrinths, Masonic symbols, church with no roof, and an underground chapel of lost knowledge.

This is New Harmony
🧵 It started with a prophecy.

In 1804, Johann Georg Rapp led 800 German Pietists across the ocean.

They believed the end was near…..and they were chosen to build God’s kingdom on Earth.

They called themselves the Harmonists.

They were celibate. Apocalyptic. Ruthlessly efficient.

And they chose Indiana.

They say the mounds are gone.
But gone isn’t the right word.
Gone implies nature took them.
Time wore them down.

The truth is:
most were removed.
Deliberately.
Quietly.

With paperwork, bulldozers, and silence.

🧵 St. Louis once had over 40 documented mounds. Some as tall as 30 feet.

It was once called Mound City.

By 1900, nearly all were gone.

Cleared for rail lines, factories, and city expansion during a time when preservation laws didn’t exist.

Decisions were made quickly. Records were sparse.

And the cultural value of these sites wasn’t yet understood by most.

Today, only one remains…..Sugarloaf.
Quiet, surrounded by houses.
Rarely mentioned. But still standing.

You don’t understand Hemingway by reading him.

You understand him by living through something, then reading him.

He wasn’t just writing fiction.

He was writing what was left
after the world took a swing at him.

🧵 He was 18 when he volunteered in WWI.

Didn’t carry a gun….carried chocolate, stretchers, cigarettes.
A mortar tore through his legs.

He fell in love with a nurse while recovering.

She left him in a letter.
That story became A Farewell to Arms.

He survived.
But everything after that had a limp.

They’re older than the Aztecs.
Taller than Stonehenge.

Built without wheels, metal, or beasts of burden.

But they barely make the textbooks.

Here are the 5 largest ancient mounds still standing in North America….plus 4 that time almost buried:

🧵👇 1. Monks Mound — Cahokia, Illinois
📍100 ft tall | 14 acres at base | 1050 CE

The largest earthwork in the Americas.

Aligned to solstices. Tiered like a ziggurat. Over 22 million cubic feet of earth….moved by hand.

It’s taller than the pyramids by volume.

Still standing. Still ignored.

This is real.
A massive earthwork once carved into Ohio’s soil.

Some say it was a giant menorah.
Others say it was a Thunderbird.

What no one serious believes?
That it was built by ancient Israelites.

Let’s tell the real story. 🧵 Discovered near Milford, Ohio in 1823.
Surveyed by Maj. Isaac Roberdeau.

Nine long ridges.
One winding enclosure.
A footprint unlike anything else recorded in North America.

Today? Flattened. Gone.

But the mystery remains.

Today is the summer solstice.
To most, it’s just the longest day of the year.

But to ancient Americans
it was something far more powerful.

A cosmic turning point
etched into the earth by hand.

🧵👇 Before clocks or calendars, they watched the sky.

They tracked time by light.
Marked seasons with shadow.

And they aligned their sacred sites—
to solstices, equinoxes, even lunar standstills.

This wasn’t guesswork.
This was astronomy.

In a remote desert of New Mexico lie the ruins of a city that shouldn’t exist.

No river. No farmland. No reason.

But they built it anyway. Aligned to the stars, carved into stone, and linked across hundreds of miles.

This is the mystery of Chaco Canyon.
🧵👇 850 and 1150 AD, Chaco became one of the most sophisticated cultural hubs in North America.

Massive stone buildings—some 4 stories tall.

200,000+ trees hauled from 50+ miles away.

Roads stretching across 70,000 square miles.

Before the Maya.
Before Rome.
While Egypt raised its first pyramid
a city rose in the Mississippi Valley.

No writing.
Just geometry, trade, and vision.

But they built something the world wasn’t ready for.

Come with me on a series about Poverty Point. 🧵 2000 BC. Northeast Louisiana.

They weren’t farmers.
No crops. No draft animals. No wheel.

But they fished. Traded. Tracked seasons.And then they built geometry into the land.

Ridges. Mounds. Causeways.

Cities weren’t supposed to exist in North America.

This one did.

For centuries, the Red River was choked by a tangled wall of trees.

It looked like land.
It swallowed boats.
It changed the map.

They called it the Great Raft.

When it was finally destroyed, towns collapsed, rivers shifted, and the land began to die.

Let me show you 🧵 This wasn’t driftwood.
It was a living system….dense logs, sediment, and root masses built up over 160+ miles, from Louisiana into northeast Texas.

Some trace its formation back to 1100 AD.

By the 1800s, it was reshaping trade, ecology, and culture across the region.

In Oxford, Alabama, there once stood a massive earthen mound.

It had towered over the Choccolocco Valley for centuries—likely over 1,500 years old.

Then in 2009, it was flattened.
To build a Sam’s Club and a sports complex.

No protection.
No study.
Just gone. Local historians had known about the mound for generations.

It stood near Choccolocco Creek an area dense with Native presence.

Archaeologists believe it was built by a Mississippian or Woodland-era culture.

A place of ceremony.
Or memory.
Possibly even burial.

They turned desert into farmland.
Built 500 miles of canals by hand.

Played ballgames before the Aztecs existed.

And ran one of the largest trade networks in ancient North America.

But most Americans have never heard of them.

Let’s talk about the Hohokam.🧵 The Hohokam lived in the Salt and Gila River valleys of present-day Arizona for over 1,000 years (c. 200–1450 CE).

The name comes from the O’odham word meaning “those who are gone.”

But they didn’t vanish.
They left behind an engineered landscape and a complex cultural legacy.

What if Atlantis wasn’t across the ocean…but buried under cornfields in the American Midwest?

A star-aligned, pyramid-filled city.
Rising fast.

Collapsing mysteriously.
Its name wasn’t Atlantis

But its story sounds awfully familiar.

Let’s talk about Cahokia. 🧵 Around 1100 AD, Cahokia was the largest city north of Mexico.

• Bigger than London
• 50,000 people
• 120+ earthen mounds
• Solstice-aligned Woodhenge
• Gridded streets, elite districts, and a global trade web

This wasn’t a village. It was a city-state of vision and scale.

They told us the Midwest was empty.
Just wilderness and woods.

But under the cul-de-sacs and cornfields lie something far older—
Roads.

Massive, straight, ritual highways built long before Columbus.

Let me show you what they buried🧵 Across Ohio and Indiana, ancient causeways stretched across the land.

Dead straight.
60 to 100 feet wide.
Often raised or ditched.

They weren’t deer trails.
They connected sacred enclosures, mounds, and ceremonial hubs with precision.

This was intentional design.

In 1673, two Frenchmen paddled into the heart of North America.

They expected wilderness.

What they found instead stunned them:

Cities. Diplomacy. Agriculture. Order.

This wasn’t “virgin land.”
It was a continent in full bloom.

Here’s what Marquette & Joliet actually saw:🧵 Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet were sent to explore the Mississippi, hoping it led to the Pacific.

They were some of the first Europeans to traverse the upper Mississippi Valley.

But they weren’t discovering anything.

They were entering sovereign nations.