Dear All: We’ve finished PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR. We just shipped the 160,000 word manuscript off to our editor at Tor/Forge. Writing this one was just plain fun. The research on the great site at Cahokia has come such a long way since we wrote PEOPLE OF THE RIVER back in 1991. Since that time, archaeologists have been amazed at the size and scope of the city in the 12th and 13th centuries. As authors we have been able to write about characters that could have existed nowhere else in prehistoric America. For all of you Dusty and Maureen fans, you’ll enjoy the modern forward. Dusty has an “encounter” with a film crew doing a show on ancient aliens. And, well, being Dusty, he has a most definite opinion about their “work.” We don’t have a release date for the book yet, but expect it no earlier than December of this year, and more likely in 2014. As soon as we hear, we’ll post it here and in the fan club. Like all of our novels, disparate data came together to answer one of the perplexing questions about Cahokia: Did they have writing? Our clues came from the Iroquois wampum belts which, contrary to popular belief, were not money. Actually they were records. Entire treaties, agreements, and speechs were recorded by a specific pattern of beads utilizing shapes, colors, and sizes to denote words. Is this applicable to Cahokia? The evidence recovered from the excavation at Mound 72 is provocative, especially in the bead cache and the “Falcon” blanket under burials 13 and 14. From Fowler’s description, it sounds like wampum. Writing at Cahokia will remain a hypothesis until tested by further research. But it sure looks possible to us. Wampum served as such reliable records they were admissible in early Colonial courts, and so persuasive that politicians went out of their way to have the belts destroyed. Our suspicion is that, like so much in eastern North America, wampum had its roots in Cahokia. It would explain how they were able to manage such a wide-spread empire.