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| Spiro Mounds: North America's lost civilisation | |
| 2021-06-23 | |
The story of the long-forgotten Spiro settlement seems particularly timely. It tells of a people desperately trying to adapt to a changing climate that would ultimately destroy their society. And at a moment when interest in Indigenous communities is growing, it's a chance to marvel at the craftsmanship and sophistication of a forgotten nation whose trade routes snaked thousands of miles across the continent. Spiro's treasures include engraved conch shells from the Florida Keys, copper breastplates from the Great Lakes and beads from the Gulf of California. Spiro was home to a ceremonial centre for a loosely aligned confederation of mound-building nations called the Mississippian Culture. Together it included about 3 million people from more than 60 tribes, speaking 30 different languages. The other principal cities were in Etowah, Georgia; Moundville, Alabama; and Cahokia, Illinois, near St. Louis, which was the biggest. These settlements rose to prominence beginning in the 800s during a period of favourable weather patterns that allowed them to create stable, agriculture-based societies, said Dennis Peterson, an archaeologist and manager of the Spiro site. Traditionally, women tended crops like corn, beans, squash and sunflowers, while men hunted small game. Spiro, located on the Arkansas River, sat at a natural passage between the east and west, and grew as a trade centre. But around 1250, the rains became less predictable during a period known as the Little Ice Age. The cities began to crumble. To save itself, Spiro's priests made a desperate attempt to "restart the universe". Archaeologists say the leaders rebuilt an existing royal burial mound, filling the hollow chamber with the most powerful ritual objects they had including rare minerals, feathered capes, axes and other weapons. The hope was that the ceremonial burying of sacred property would return the city to its previous state, bringing back the steady rains and long growing seasons that had let Spiro flourish. But the drought cycle continued, and by 1450, the mound city was abandoned. The residents drifted off, their descendants joining today's Caddo Nation and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, whose territories once included parts of the US states of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. | |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #5 Thanks for the post skid. Now more reading and research for me. Love it Spiro ! |
| Posted by: Xyz 2021-06-23 21:13 |
| #4 what the BBC calls the 1250 little ice age LIA) is the end of the middle age warmth period 1250 to about 1400 is the transition before the LIA |
| Posted by: Lord Garth 2021-06-23 18:00 |
| #3 Apocryphal apexes of aboriginals Minuscule mounds for non-marmoreal mudhandlers Pretentious protrusions by prehensile primitives |
| Posted by: Spiro T. Leakey2151 2021-06-23 15:11 |
| #2 Were these mounds named after Spiro T Agnew Because this is where her buried the political bodies after being Governor of Maryland ? (Agnew won national recognition for speeches in which he denounced Vietnam War protesters and other opponents of the Nixon administration with colourful epithets such as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Agnew was despised by most Democrats and sometimes drew censure even from Republicans, as he did for accusing Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1968, of being “soft on communism.”) |
| Posted by: Thrusock Slelet8628 2021-06-23 14:40 |