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.

America bulldozed its ancient cities.

Not myths.
Not tribes.
Cities.

Ceremonial centers aligned to the stars, built by engineers, astronomers, and artists flattened for parking lots, farmland, and factories.

Here are 7 sacred Indigenous sites we lost forever:🧵 Kunneman Mounds (IL)

North of Cahokia’s core stood a group of platform mounds—Mounds 6–11 arranged with intention.

They were removed during railroad expansion and early development, excavations were hurried.

Work in the 1950s was meticulously documented but never fully published.

A studied part of the Cahokia world, lost.

In 1601, Spanish conquistadors wandered into southern Kansas…

And found a Native city with 20,000+ people.

Dome-shaped lodges. Plazas. Gridded streets. It stretched for 5+ miles.

Then it vanished from memory.

Buried under silence—until we found it.

This is Etzanoa:🧵 The Spanish called the people Rayados—for their tattooed faces.

They were likely ancestors of the Wichita, a Caddoan-speaking group.

These weren’t nomads.
They farmed corn, beans, and squash. Built permanent homes. Crafted tools and pottery.

Etzanoa was a city.
And a capital.

St. Louis was once covered in ancient mounds—27 of them.
Built before pyramids rose in Egypt.

Today, only one remains.

Hidden in plain sight.
Forgotten by most.

It’s called Sugarloaf Mound and it’s the last living monument of a sacred city.

Let me show you why it matters🧵 Sugarloaf Mound rises 30 feet above the Mississippi, near the old footpaths that connected Cahokia to the Gulf and Great Lakes.

It likely dates back 1,000+ years—built by ancestors of the Osage Nation, part of the same Mississippian civilization that shaped a continent.

In the 1990s, on a remote stretch of the Savannah River, a team of archaeologists made a bold choice:

Archaeologists went below the Clovis layer.

And what they found—stone tools in a layer 50,000 years old—could change everything we thought we knew.

Welcome to Topper.
🧵 Topper had long been known as a Clovis-era site.

Spear points.
Scrapers.
Flint blades.

But Dr. Albert Goodyear of the University of South Carolina kept asking:

What came before?

So he kept digging—below the Clovis layer.

And that’s where the real mystery began.

Most people think the Fort Ancient culture built Fort Ancient.

They didn’t.

But what they did build?

Villages aligned to the sun.
Turtle-shaped mounds.
Wooden henges.

And some of the last sacred earthworks before colonial forces hit the Ohio Valley.

Let’s set the record straight🧵 Who were the Fort Ancient people?

Not a single tribe.
Not a mystery race.

They were a cultural tradition that lasted from ~AD 1000 to 1750 across the Ohio River Valley.

Born from Hopewell remnants, shaped by Mississippian influence, and grounded in the land they were the last mound-building society of the Eastern Woodlands.

🧵 In 1933, looters cracked open a mound in Oklahoma. What they found rewrote everything we thought we knew about ancient America.

Buried inside Craig Mound at the Spiro site was a sealed vault—deliberately constructed, cedar-lined, and filled with more ceremonial objects than any other Native site in the U.S.

This was no grave.

It was a spiritual vault built by the Mississippians. The Spiro site spans 80 acres and includes 12 mounds.

But Craig Mound held the treasure:
• Over 2,000 shell ornaments
• Dozens of repoussé copper plates
• Feathered garments, woven textiles, and cane mats
• Pipes, carved effigies, and bundled offerings
Most dated 1100–1450 AD.

You’ve heard of Cahokia.
Maybe even The Birdman.

But across ancient America, mound-building cultures weren’t just raising earth.

They buried people in it.
Sometimes in pieces.
Sometimes still alive.

Let’s talk about ritual sacrifice in the ancient Midwest and South.
🧵 Start with Cahokia, Illinois—Ancient North America’s largest city.

Around 1050 AD, it boomed to 20,000+ people.

Plazas, solar calendars, large platform mounds.

But beneath Mound 72, archaeologists found something darker:

A burial site with over 270 human remains—many of them young women.

They call it a Civil War battlefield.

But hidden in the trees, before muskets and bayonets, this land held an older power

A sacred city of mounds.
Built not for war—but for ceremony, for cosmos, for the dead.

This is Shiloh Mounds

And its history has barely been told🧵 Before 23,000 men fell here in 1862, this Tennessee bluff was home to a Mississippian capital.

From around 1000 to 1350 AD, Shiloh was a center of trade, ritual, and authority—rising above the Tennessee River.

It was one piece in a vast network that stretched to Cahokia and beyond.

Before the U.S. turned 40, one Native leader rose with a vision powerful enough to stop it in its tracks.

He built a confederacy across language lines.

He defied presidents, generals, and settlers.

And he refused to sell a single acre of land.

His name was Tecumseh 🧵 Tecumseh was born in 1768 in the Ohio Valley.

He was Shawnee. His name meant “Shooting Star.”

He lost his father to settler violence at age 6.

His mother fled west and likely died in exile.

By 15, he was fighting—not for revenge, but for principle.

He believed land could never be sold.

They didn’t just trade fur.

They razed villages. Took captives. Shattered nations.

In the 1600s, the Iroquois Confederacy launched a war of expansion that redrew the map of Native North America.

This was the Beaver Wars.
And history still struggles to talk about it. 🧵 It started with beaver pelts.
Europe was obsessed.

The Iroquois—especially the Mohawk and Seneca—wanted control.
Rivals like the Huron, Erie, and Petun held better territory.
So the Iroquois did what every rising power does.

They went to war.

It looks like just a boulder—
until you know what happened there.

Near the Tippecanoe River stands Prophet’s Rock.

Legend says that in 1811, Tenskwatawa—the Prophet—stood atop it, chanting prayers while U.S. soldiers attacked his village below.

Prophet Rock has memory. 🧵 On the night of November 6, 1811, Prophetstown was full of firelight.

A growing city of Native resistance.
Led by Tenskwatawa.

His brother Tecumseh was away.
And U.S. troops under William Henry Harrison were closing in.

The Prophet had a vision:
The enemy would fall.

Atop a sandstone bluff in southern Illinois stands a prehistoric stone wall—built without mortar, metal tools, or written records.

It’s called Giant City Stone Fort

It’s one of the most overlooked ancient structures in the Midwest. You’ll find it inside Giant City State Park, 13 miles south of Carbondale.

Follow the Stone Fort Nature Trail to a narrow ridge.

There, 80 feet above the forest floor, sits a dry-laid wall made of large sandstone blocks.

Most people think of rivers as just water.

But Indiana’s White River is older than the state itself.

For thousands of years, it’s been ceremony, survival, memory.

Hopewell priests stood on the bluffs and watched the sky reflect in its current.

This is the story of a river that remembers everything🧵 Long before Madison County, Indiana had a name, the Hopewell culture built sacred enclosures above this river.

These weren’t burial mounds.

They were ceremonial, aligned to the sky, placed high for a reason.

The river wasn’t background.

It was part of the plan.

Beneath an old tobacco field in western North Carolina lies one of the most important Indigenous sites you’ve never heard of.

Garden Creek.
Three mounds.
Three cultures.

2,000 years of sacred use—almost lost before it was even understood.

Let’s dig into it🧵 The site included:

• A platform mound
• A burial/ceremonial mound
• A third mound that was destroyed before it could be studied

Garden Creek was first built around 300 BCE and reused by multiple cultures until the 1400s CE.

That’s a 1,700-year timeline of uninterrupted significance.