Cahokia Mounds Museum Society issued the following announcement on Jan. 6.
Our Winter Lecture Series will begin on January 19 at 2 pm in the auditorium. It will feature Paul Welch, PhD who is the Anthropology Chair at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. The title of his lecture is “Fluorite Workshops and Bead Making at Kincaid Mounds, Illinois.”
Kincaid, contemporary with Cahokia, is a large, multi-mound palisaded town on the Ohio River opposite Paducah, KY. Excavations by SIUC in Kincaid’s Fluorite Workshop area in 2015 and 2016 exposed parts of two buildings where fluorite was fashioned into beads. Fluorite is a crystalline mineral with major sources in southern Illinois. In addition to its use for beads and figurines, fluorite apparently was also used elsewhere at Kincaid and other sites in southernmost Illinois as a means of consecrating large public buildings.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Cahokia Mounds Museum Society
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