When commercial excavators dug into Craig Mound in the 1930s, they found many beautifully crafted ritual artifacts, including stone effigy pipes, polished stone maces, finely made flint knives and arrow points, polished chunkey stones, copper effigy axes, Mississippian copper plates (Spiro plates), mica effigy cut outs, elaborately engraved conch shell ornaments, pearl bead necklaces, stone earspools, wood carvings inlaid with shell, and specially made mortuary pottery. It was concluded that the Spiro people had created a civilization equal to that of the Aztec or Maya. 14 Hamilton, Henry H. 1952 The Spiro Mound. Spiro Mounds was unearthed by a group of local men in the 1930s who looted it (Credit: Larry Bleiberg). The Spiro Mounds are located within the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center complex in Fort Coffee, Oklahoma. page 142, plate 100 (catalog number 95). The protected site included 150 acres of land that encompass twelve mounds, the elite village area and part of the support city. Artifacts from Spiro Mounds have been documented in at least 65 facilities around . a total of 17 blades plus three maces in the group sold to Mr. The exhibit just finished its run at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and moves to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama in October 2021, before making its final stop the following March at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. Spirometer prices. The compatriots pushed their way through the debris into a Native American mound, amazed by what they saw. The Strange Tale of SS Warrimoo, the Ship That Existed in Two Centuries at Once, Pirmide de los Nichos (Pyramid of the Niches), http://www.okhistory.org/outreach/museums/spiromounds.html, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/S/SP012.html, http://www.ou.edu/cas/archsur/counties/leflore.htm, http://www.chickasaw.tv/home/list/spiro-mounds. May 13, 2023 6 3/4" Spiro Blade. The Missouri Archaeologist Volume 14 (1952, reprint 2020) [11] Cahokia also influenced the styles of the artifacts made at Spiro. This piece is now at the Ohio During the 1930s commercial, and later academic, excavations revealed one of the greatest collections of artistic and utilitarian prehistoric American Indian artifacts in the United States. The area was largely empty from 1600 to 1832, when Choctaw and Chickasaw freedman cleared the site for farming. Director, Ohio State Museum. The interpretive centre itself feels like a time warp, where a nearly 40-year-old introductory slide is shown by request. And while it's painful to see the artefacts outside of tombs where they belong, he's pleased that non-Natives are having a chance to learn about his culture. The people of Spiro people relied on a wide variety of animals for meat, including deer, elk, turkey, fish, turtles, geese, ducks, squirrels, opossums, raccoons, and other small mammals. But the treasure soon disappeared. Anthropologists have thought that the Caddo and related peoples had been living in the region for centuries and that they had their own local variant of Mississippian culture. Composed of many tribes, the Caddo were organized into three confederacies, the Hasinai, Kadohadacho, and Natchitoches, which were all linked by similar languages. Hours Spiro has been the site of human activity for at least 8,000 years. At the height of the Great Depression, Indian relic and curio dealers and artifact collectors had caught wind of the artifacts at the heart of the Spiro Mounds area of LeFlore County, north of Poteau. The mound center declined and was eventually abandoned by AD 1450, although the city continued to be occupied for another 150 years. The 80-acres site lies near the Arkansas River in Fort Coffee, seven miles north of the town of Spiro. camera bag (See Photograph 12). Spiro continued to be used as a ceremonial and mortuary center through 1450. Human head effigy plate from 1200-1450 AD found at the Spiro site in Oklahoma (Credit: Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection), Many of the pieces are "mind-blowing", said Singleton, the exhibit curator. These were purchased the local S.S. Kresges 5 & 10 store in Bells This area of eastern Oklahoma was the seat of ancient Mississippian culture, and the Spiro Mounds grew from a small farming village to a vital cultural center in . Ohio and later donated to the Ohio Historical Society. Similar beings were the subject of myth in historic times among the Micmac, Huron, Kickapoo, Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Caddo, and other Native American tribes, appearing in tribes of at least three major language families. [citation needed], Archaeologists found that one of the conch shell cups from Craig Mound had a black residue in the bottom. Interstate 540 in Fort Smith). The conditions in this hollow space were so favorable that objects made of perishable materials such as basketry, woven fabric of plant and animal fibers, lace, fur, and feathers were preserved inside it. Braecklein, quoted in the Kansas City Star (Dec. 15, 1935) In August of 1935, John Hobbs of the Pocola Mining Company broke into the sealed chamber beneath Craig Mound, near Spiro in eastern Oklahoma. hometown of Marion, Ohio. Engraving of a Birdman found in Spiro Mound. The Human Effigy head was purchased by Dr. C.P. Monolithic Axes From The Spiro Site, LeFlore County, Oklahoma had been found in 1970 at a burial mound in Spiro in northern Le . [4] The cultivation of maize during this period allowed accumulation of crop surpluses and the gathering of more dense populations. north of Oklahoma Highway 9 in Spiro. They soon unearthed bones, along with arrowheads, pipes and copper relics. of 205 bird points from Spiro. item 1393.1A. Admission . This suggests that the Spiro people may have practiced a version of the Black Drink Ceremony, a purification ritual that was also performed in historic times by their descendants - the southeastern tribes. Spiro Mounds Archaeological Park [34 LF 40, Fort Coffee Mounds, Craig The Treasure of Spiro Mounds - 405 Magazine Spiro Mounds Archaeological Park submitted by Flickr Copper artifact from Spiro Mounds Image copyright: tobeyruth (Ruth Tobey), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. The largest Mississippian ceremonial center known today is Cahokia. Nearly a century later, the incident remains the worst looting of an archaeological site in US history. Spiro was home to a ceremonial centre for a loosely aligned confederation of mound-building nations called the Mississippian Culture. [8] When the commercial excavators finished, they dynamited the burial chamber and sold the commercially valuable artifacts, made of stone, pottery, copper, and conch shell, to collectors in the United States and overseas. The 80-acre site is located within a floodplain on the southern side of the Arkansas River. at Spiro in August 1935. long narrow blades from the Wehrle Cache. Investigating Spiro Mounds - Arkansas Archeological Survey The Spiro mound collection in the Museum Burnett, Edwin Kenneth ; Clements, Forrest E. ; Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1945 from the occipital hairknot is a copper feather that curves up These plates, along with artifacts from Spiro and Moundville Archaeological Site were instrumental in the development of the archaeological concept of the S.E.C.C. Much of the Spiro culture is still a mystery, as well as the reasons for the decline and abandonment of the site. The fact that the Great Mortuary at Spiro was built with cedar (or cedar elm) posts suggests that the burial chamber was meant to be a point of departure from one spiritual domain to another, as cedar was a sacred wood. . The rest of the artifacts were sold off around the world; most were lost to obscurity. Spiro's bounty is now spread among more than 65 museums across the US, Europe and Asia, and researchers are still discovering additional galleries and people possessing its riches. As the nation prospered, a priest class evolved, which took responsibility for planting and harvest ceremonies, and marking the annual solstices and equinoxes that governed the growing seasons. 2 11/16" Tablet. The Spiro people did not rely on maize as their primary cultivated crop like the inhabitants of the other ceremonial centers. The Spiro Mound, reportedly by Bill Heydon Vandagriff, and Inside lay unimaginable treasure. Good condition. A. He acquired many fine Spiro artifacts, that eventually went to Earl Townsend. All rights reserved. [20] Wichita and Kitsai are both extinct. Running horizontally along the inner walls, the lines indicate that the hollow inside was perhaps carefully scraped away. It was built in Norway around the year 820, and it was discovered in a large burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tnsberg in 1904. Engraved shell gorget fragment traced by Hamilton (1952: 70, Plate 88d); he identified the iconography as dancers with bows. It also contained the third-largest pyramidal mound in all the Americas. figure in the cutout can be seen wearing such an earspool. No purchase necessary. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacn and the great pyramid at Cholula, both located in Mexico, are the only pyramids larger than Monks Mound. Artifacts from across the country have been found at Spiro Mounds, including copper from the Great Lakes, shell beads from the Gulf of California, and a conch shell from the Gulf of Mexico . By AD 1375, archaeological investigations indicate that the region was consumed with warfare and the city sacked. It was created as a circle of sacred cedar posts sunk in the ground and angled together at the top similarly to a tipi. Bell arranged the transaction and, for $100, the frame was Mid-range: From $20 to $40, you can find lower-end digital models and incentive spirometers. Dardanelle, Arkansas originally assembled this outstanding frame Another Spiro icon is the "Great Serpent", a being said to inhabit the Under World, the spiritual domain on the opposite side of the Mississippian universe. Leflore Co, OK. Edited by Eric D. Singleton and F. Kent Reilly III. Spiro was the westernmost outpost of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, also known as the Southern Death Cult or Buzzard Cult, which included Cahokia (now East St. Louis), Moundville in Alabama, and Etowah in Georgia. 4 1/4" Copper Knife. Spiro Mound. Leflore Co, OK. Good condition. The mounds site, located seven miles outside of Spiro, Oklahoma, is the only prehistoric, American Indian archaeological site in Oklahoma open to the public. This point measures 1 13/16 inches long (46mm) and 1 1/16 inches wide (26mm). This site has been significant for North American archaeology since the 1930s, especially due to its many preserved textiles and a wealth of shell carving. Where are mounds located? spot of only 3/8 inch. It was item # 103 in the Harry T. The Spiro Mounds treasure made headlines nationwide. The Caddoan Mississippian towns had a more irregular layout of earthen mounds and associated villages than did towns in the Middle Mississippian heartland to the east. Hamilton (1952) Plate 73, and Hamilton, et. May 13, 2023 27" Strand of Spiro Carved Shell Beads. Artistically made. "This is something they can have pride in.". By 1450, the mound city of Spiro was abandoned (Credit: alantobey/Getty Images). These include Cahokia in Illinois, the largest Mississippian town; Etowah and Ocmulgee in Georgia; and Moundville in Alabama. During the height of its looting in the winter of 1935, the Spiro sitelocated in northeastern Oklahoma just 10 miles west of Fort Smithwas catapulted to fame by a headline published in the Kansas City Star (December 15, 1935) proclaiming it "A 'King Tut' Tomb in the Arkansas Valley ". But the drought cycle continued, and by 1450, the mound city was abandoned. B. It is a Spiro Mound site that has a large amount of burial art and Spiro Winged Serpent A group of six local men hoped they could make money by selling Native American artefacts, and formed a company named after the nearby town of Pocola. While reaching firm conclusions about the meanings of works of art made centuries ago by people of an extinct culture is difficult, they have made some compelling interpretations by comparing Mississippian artistic imagery with the myths, religious rituals, art, and iconography of historic Native American groups.
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