This article’s assertion: Because tourists feel bad about being reminded that they genocided the people whose ancestors built those ruins. :-/
*Modern tourists* did not genocide anybody. Some of their *ancestors* may have genocided somebody. Others of them didn’t have any ancestors in the country at the time. It’s more likely that tourists are more interested in European ruins because 1) things outside your own country are always more interesting and 2) European and Asian ruins get a lot of coverage in history classes relative to North American ruins, and people want to go see the shit they’ve read about.
Also, what metric is this using for “larger than London in 1250″? The article says Cahokia had ten to twenty thousand inhabitants; the closest data point I have for London in 1250 is this wikipedia page, which says London had fifty thousand inhabitants in 1300. So it was more like half the size of London. Which is still awesome! Ancient cities=damn cool. But don’t make that your page quote factoid when it’s fucking wrong.
…wait, do we now have to feel bad that we would feel bad about visiting? Because if so, then ugh.
I visited Cahokia. I guess that makes me a sociopath.
Anyway, the reason more people visit Machu Picchu than Cahokia is because Macchu Pichu looks like this:
And Cahokia looks like this:
I’m not deliberately using a bad picture of Cahokia. Google image search it - this is the center of the site, the famous landmark that everyone takes pictures of.
In Ireland, there’s a site called the Hill of Tara, which was the center of the ancient Irish culture and super-sacred to the ancestors of the modern Irish. Today it just looks like a random hill. The Irish built a motorway through it, and it gets fewer visitors each year than Cahokia.
I’ve been to Mesa Verde, it’s cause they’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere.
