The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Native American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of North America around 13,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. The culture is named for artifacts found near Clovis, New Mexico, where the first evidence of this tool complex was excavated in 1932. Earlier evidence included a mammoth skeleton with a spear-point in its ribs, found...
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is located on the site of an ancient Native American city (c. 600-1400 CE) situated directly across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis, Missouri. This historic park lies in southern Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville. The park covers 2,200 acres (890 ha), or about 3.5 square miles, and contains about 80 mounds, but the ancient city was...
Rigel is the brightest star in the constellation Orion and the sixth brightest star in the sky, with visual magnitude 0.18. Although it has the Bayer designation “beta”, it is almost always brighter than Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse). Rigel is well beyond the current range of accurate parallax measurements; spectroscopic estimates place its distance between 700 and 900 light-years (210...
The term Black Sun (German Schwarze Sonne), also referred to as the Sonnenrad (the German for “Sun Wheel”), is a symbol of esoteric or occult significance. Its design is based on a sun wheel incorporated in a floor of Wewelsburg Castle during the Nazi era. Today, it may also be used in occult currents of Germanic neopaganism, and in Irminenschaft or Armanenschaft-inspired esotericism...
Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although only eight species of bears are extant, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern Hemisphere and partially in the Southern Hemisphere. Bears are found on the continents of North America...
The Bald Eagle is a bird of prey found in North America. A sea eagle, it has two known sub-species and forms a species pair with the White-tailed Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla). Its range includes most of Canada and Alaska, all of the contiguous United States, and northern Mexico. It is found near large bodies of open water with an abundant food supply and old-growth trees for nesting. The Bald...
Apache is the collective name for several culturally related tribes of Native Americans, aboriginal inhabitants of North America, who speak a Southern Athabaskan language. The modern term excludes the related Navajo people.The origin of the name Apache is uncertain. It may derive from the Yavapai word epache, meaning “people”. The origin has also been claimed to be the Zuni word...
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years (called a Great or Platonic Year...
The Ancestral Puebloans were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. The Ancestral Puebloans are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara Tradition, who developed from the Picosa culture. They lived in a...
Native Americans (also Aboriginal Peoples, Aboriginal Americans, American Indians, Amerindians, Amerind, Indians, First Nations, First Peoples, Native Canadians, or Indigenous Peoples of America) are those peoples indigenous to the Americas, living there prior to European colonization. This term encompasses a large number of distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of them still enduring...