Just about an hour away from Columbia, you'll find this cave, and the story here is interesting to say the least.
Archaeology/Remains - Sites Uncovered/Locations
By Michael Gibney
Columbia, Missouri (AP) 9-08
The story begins, as many do, with curiosity.
About 20 years ago, two men exploring a place known as Picture Cave found paintings on the rock walls and sent hand-drawn reproductions to archaeologists Jim Duncan and Carol Diaz-Granados.
“These things are fake!” Duncan remembered thinking at the time.As it turned out, the nature and location of the drawings contradicted widely held beliefs about Mississippian culture.
The figures on the walls of the cave in east-central Missouri now provide crucial details of the prehistoric timeline of the region. And there’s recent evidence that the paintings in Picture Cave predate the Cahokia Mounds as the birthplace of what archaeologists refer to as the Mississippian period.
According to archaeological records, the Mississippian period saw the creation of some of the first large towns and city centers north of Mexico. The conventional belief has been that this period started around 1050 A.D., but the drawings in Picture Cave indicate the period began earlier and in a different location.
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