Visiting Spiro Mounds

It was a good day, and a good day to go do this - it was just beautiful out, sunny, neither too warm nor too chilly. (There are a lot of walking paths at the site, so it was good to be able to get out in good weather).

It's pretty far from me. It took just about three hours (a bit longer going up because I pulled off once or twice to consult the map - yes, I still use paper maps). It's a pretty direct route; up 69/75 to McAlester, over on 31 until it ends, and then up 271. And then there are signs. It's not actually IN Spiro, it's north of it. And it's very near to the Arkansas border. (If I had been in the mood for an overnight trip, I probably could have pressed on afterward to Eureka Springs or somewhere).

Spiro Mounds is the site of an old Caddoan Mississippian city complex - most of the information they have is from the 800 AD to 1450 AD (which is apparently when the site was abandoned) time period, but the museum displayed suggested people might have been living there much farther back in time.

There's a small museum with displays and some artifacts (most of which are recreations, more about that later). There's also a lot of history about the people - how they lived, what they ate, what their religious life was like. There are also the walking paths - there are four different ones. Two of them are paved and pretty accessible, the other two were described as "gravel paths" but are more mowed paths and while they're not a DIFFICULT walk, for some one on crutches or in a wheelchair they probably wouldn't be doable (And that's noted on the trail guide).

The walking trails are interesting and are worth doing. There's a trail guide they loan out, and there are numbered stops along the way that explain different things. There's a re-creation of the type of house the people would have used. It's a pretty sturdy and nice house - baked-clay walls (they would light fires inside and out the unfinished structure to harden the clay) and then the roof is held up by cedar timbers (cedar is pretty impervious to rot) and the roofs were sort of thatched. They had either sleeping platforms, or some houses apparently had evidence of sleeping lofts up under the roof.

One interesting fact: Even though men did all of the ritual type stuff and were the only ones allowed in to the temples for the major religious ceremonies, the women apparently owned the houses and there may have been somewhat of a matrilineal structure to the society.

Both sexes worked. Women did most of the farming and food preparation (they had a re-creation of the "manos" or "metate" that was used for grinding corn and other grains, with an invitation to try it out - the stones are VERY heavy and I daresay you'd have well-toned arms if you did that every day of your life to prepare food). They also gathered some wild plants as food. The men hunted but also did some of the heavy labor like homebuilding. Apparently some people were artisans and made things out of clay. They also showed re-creations of  "twillwork" baskets, probably made by the women. And they had some cloth, though there wasn't much information on that - they had what was probably part of a drop spindle among the artifacts, and a drawing of a piece of woven cloth. Somewhere else they noted that bison fiber was spun, but I suspect they may also have had some kind of bast-type plant fiber or something - bison would have been AWFULLY warm to wear in the summers.

They also played. Two games - which I already knew of from my other reading - were stickball (a form of which is still played; I have a Choctaw student who is on a stickball team. It is something like lacrosse) and chunkey, which is where a spool-shaped stone or fired clay piece is rolled and the competitors threw pointed sticks where they predicted the chunkey stone would stop. The person who got the closest to the stone's final destination won. An interesting thing: the games were sometimes used to settle disputes - the winner was deemed the winner of the land (or whatever) dispute. (According to Tim Pauketat, chunkey was also a "symbolic" game - that apparently the round stone was symbolic of the female sex organs, and the spear was "male" and it sometimes featured in fertility rites....)

The main religious activity seemed to be worship of a sun god, though apparently there was also a sort of sin-cleansing ceremony the men took part in, where they took a purgative and then fasted and at the end, the chief forgave them and told them, effectively, "Go and sin no more."

(I'm guessing a lot of this came from later accounts of the remaining peoples that were taken down by French priests or someone like that; I don't know how they'd get such detailed information otherwise from the artifacts alone)

There were different classes, kind of like at Cahokia, but less so - there was an elite class, but according to the information at the site, the main difference was that they had bigger houses set up on mounds and got buried with more stuff. (Shell beads and the like). Ordinary workmen were sometimes buried with their tools, which is an interesting thought. (I guess new ones were just made for the next generation? Maybe there were taboos against inheriting something from the deceased?)

The paths wound around the various mounds. Not a lot to see at the mounds, other than to know they are there - several of them are unexcavated; they were examined with ground-penetrating radar but the decision was made to leave them intact, either for future archaeologists with even better methods, or perhaps, as attitudes change, the idea of leaving them that way as "sacred" to the memory of those who lived there (and out of respect to their distant descendants). There was a note on the trail guide observing that the mounds may be still sacred to some people, and so to be respectful. (It makes me a little sad that people have to be reminded to be respectful of an archaeological site where part of it IS a burial ground of the dead. We wouldn't want people behaving badly in our cemeteries.)

This is one of the places where having a vivid imagination is good: at one point, they have you looking out over an open plain area and briefly describe the town that once was there. And I could almost see it. I think part of the reason these kinds of things fascinate me is that I try to imagine what it would be like to live in that setting - if I were dropped down there with few tools, how would I get food and make shelter? If I had been a woman during that era, what would I have done? (I would hope I'd have been the wife of an ordinary guy; the wife of the ceremonial head of the group was sacrificed when he died. And it seems like the ordinary people had decent lives - lots of hard work, yes, but it seemed like they also had time to make art, and they had decent lifespans and seemed to be fairly healthy, based on the bones recovered. And that area seemed to suffer less warfare than some areas further east.)

There was also an active trading network. I kind of knew that, but was surprised by things like the fact that they apparently had an "ambassador" in South Florida who managed to procure conch shells (which were highly prized) and get them back to the people in Spiro. 

Oh, and the reason why most of the artifacts were re-creations? Most of the actual ones are owned by the Noble Museum. And a lot of the earliest-removed artifacts are just gone; the site was originally opened up in the 1930s by a couple of people who plundered the mounds for stuff they could sell. (They weren't the land owners, as far as I could tell)

The area was apparently abandoned around 1450 AD. According to the information from the museum, a prolonged drought (lasting some 150 years) started around 1250 AD, which led to a decline in resources (I'm guessing it would be too hard to carry water for the farm plots from the Arkansas River, which really isn't that far away). And of course, after that would have been the Little Ice Age, though I don't know how much that would have affected the southern US - I mostly know of its effects from northern Europe, from my reading.

But it was definitely worth a trip.