The Story of Spiro Mounds, Or, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Syd walking through the Spiro site, 2014.

 Only eight years after the first time I requested it from my local university's library (ahem), I finally read Looting Spiro Mounds!

It is SO good, but the story that it tells is so sad, and now I am IN A MOOD.

As the story goes, once upon a time in the 1100s, Spiro was a town not like the other towns in what is the present-day US. It didn't have a palisade surrounding it like its contemporary, Angel Mounds, nor was it a rich population center like its contemporary, Cahokia. What it did, have, however, was an absolutely excellent location, on the banks of an Arkansas river that obligingly flooded at a predictable time every spring, laying down that precious silt, and within trading distance of other population centers in all the cardinal directions. At Spiro, you could get buffalo skins from the west, and conch shells from the south, and from the east and north you could get goods that had been traded to those locations from even further away. It was an awesome place to live, and the people of Spiro were known as great farmers and great traders.

It's theorized that Spiro was headed by a priest-chief, whose main jobs were to perform the rituals that controlled the weather, and to be in charge of the burials of the rich and fancy people. Rich and fancy people were buried with their fabulous, luxurious worldly possessions, and there was a very involved multi-step, years-long process. It kept them busy!

At Spiro, mounds were built for various reasons, but mostly when a building was burned to the ground, then dirt was hauled to cover it. Repeat that a few times, and you've got a decent mound! Mounds also covered some of these burials, but mostly they probably weren't ceremonial. 

Will learning how mounds were formed at Spiro, 2014.

So for a long time, things went GREAT at Spiro. They were super into trading, and so they gathered a ton of exotic goods. This also covers the time period that Cahokia dissolved as a population center, and the people of Spiro seem to have collected a ton of luxury, ceremonial, and religious goods from Cahokia, as well. Like, the people of Spiro had SO MUCH SWAG!

And then came the Little Ice Age. The Arkansas river stopped its predictable flooding pattern, and drought killed off so many trees that many of the animals that people usually hunted simply died or moved elsewhere. No ceremonies that the priest-chief did seemed to help the situation.

After generations of this, the priest-chief got do-or-die desperate. The people collected every fancy nice thing they owned and placed them in a chamber they were building, roofed with a teepee made of cedar posts. They broke into the burial chambers of their ancestors, and moved their bones and their fancy grave goods to this chamber, as well. They surrounded it with engraved conch shells and mounded dirt on top. It looked something like this:

It's possible that the cedar posts were meant to work like a funnel, channeling all the power from the fancy goods up through their point and towards the priest-chief standing above it on the mound, who then could perform the very best, most powerful ceremony ever performed.

The ceremony didn't work. The weather remained unconducive to the farming and hunting traditions practiced there, and so the people eventually just left. Nobody's entirely certain where they went, although there are some good theories about other nations they could have joined or even founded. Possibly they simply scattered, and joined or founded lots of other nations.

A few more centuries passed, and yet nobody else ever moved onto that particular land... until 1832, when the American government forced the Choctaw Nation out of their own country and onto this land in present-day Oklahoma. And then even later, they forced them to reallocate even this land from communal property to individual holdings, also for nefarious reasons. 

Some citizens of the Choctaw Nation had kept enslaved Black people, even during the Trail of Tears and into their possession of this land in present-day Oklahoma. When they were required to emancipate these people during the Civil War, they were also required to make them Choctaw citizens. This became a Whole Other Thing, and it's still going on today. Because of racism, though, when it was time to divvy up the land, the Choctaw Nation gave the Choctaw Freedmen the shittiest bits.

If you're a farmer, what counts as a shitty bit of land? Well, land that has a bunch of stupid hills on it!

They did know that these hills were mounds created by indigenous peoples, but they weren't their indigenous peoples, so they didn't fuss over them too much, although they didn't flatten them, either. And it was a pretty common hobby to wander around the area and pick up artifacts, mostly arrowheads and ear gauges, etc. For some reason, people in the US were both obsessed with the genocide of Native Americans AND obsessed with their ancient history, and artifact collecting and buying and selling were major pastimes and were thought of as a pretty good side hustle.

This side hustle picked up big-time during the Great Depression, and dealers would drive around the countryside in cars with advertising painted on, looking for artifacts to buy. Collecting artifacts was mostly a hobby people would engage in to make a little extra cash, and people didn't particularly mind that stuff got broken or that they were just pulling it out of the land and selling it without any context or interest in what it could say about history--they just wanted to find it and sell it!

Then a few guys got the bright idea to go into business together, lease the land that some of the mounds sat on from their owners, the descendents of those original Choctaw Freedmen, and see what they could dig up.

It was a great idea for them, in that they immediately started digging up some excellent stuff. As fast as they could roughly haul priceless artifacts out of the ground, the local dealers would swindle them away from them for a pittance, then the dealers would turn around and sell it an inflated price to private collectors. It got so bad that after a while even the dealers had to reduce their prices by a ridiculous degree, because they had completely flooded the market.

When savvy museum curators saw all these artifacts suddenly flooding the market, they knew some major find had to have been made. It wasn't hard to trace the flow back to Spiro, and many curators even visited in person, and were rightly horrified when they saw a few guys with shovels, digging away and breaking half of what they found. But they still wanted this stuff in their collections, so they bought things, too.

And then this anthropologist from the University of Oklahoma, Forrest Clements, found out what was going on, and he came charging in to screw everything up even further. What he wanted was for the guys who'd leased the land to stop pulling stuff up willy-nilly and selling it off to the highest bidder. But of course, in expressing this to the guys, he talked to them like they were stupid, copped a big attitude, and essentially made himself their enemy for life. And he couldn't do anything about it, anyway, because they'd leased the land fair and square and there weren't any laws to say they couldn't do what they wanted with whatever they found.

So Clements changed his focus to lobbying for a law that said they couldn't do what they wanted with whatever they found. And because he was rich and they weren't, and he had lots of rich friends and they didn't, he actually got that law passed. It was one of the first antiquities laws in the country, and it was a big deal. It made it illegal for the guys to sell any antiquities that they found, so even though they still had their lease on the land for a few more months, they were effectively cut off from benefiting from what they'd paid for. I'd be pissed, too!

And if I'd been the mastermind behind that law, and therefore knew good and well that these guys who were sitting on a national treasure hated me, I sure wouldn't do what Clements did next, which was fuck off to California for three months. He figured all he had to do was wait until that lease ran out, and then go over to the landowner and lease it for the university. He could have his own nice, big, leisurely excavation and have all the nice antiquities for his own museum. Might as well spend the time until that could happen in California!

Yeah... no. The second he was out of the way, these guys said, "Screw it. Let's just tunnel straight through the middle of this-here big mound, and whatever we find we'll just sell it on the black market."

So that's what they did, and as their luck would have it, they essentially tunneled straight into that ceremonial burial chamber, bounded by the engraved conch shells, reinforced by the cedar beam teepee, full of every rich artifact that the priest-chief and all of his people could obtain. It was National Treasure levels of loot, with the added bonus of being embedded in a matrix of cultural context and untouched history, as fresh as if these ancient peoples had closed it off the day before.

And these guys absolutely destroyed it.

As in, they literally destroyed it. They pulled out thousands of intact priceless treasures, but they were so excited that they also broke tons more priceless treasures, and other priceless treasures they didn't know were priceless treasures, so they just carted it out and dumped it. Nobody knows what those engraved conch shell bits contained or what they could have meant, because the guys dumped them in a pile outside on the ground and people walked all over them until none remained intact. Nobody knows the provenance of the cedar posts or what they could have told about the time and place in which they were made, because they guys burned them in a bonfire. 

And when their lease was almost up and they guys figured they didn't have time for more excavation, they filled the chamber with gunpowder and exploded it.

Clements was BIG MAD when he found out. But then when it was his turn to lease the land, he proved himself to be just as short-sighted and money hungry because his excavation literally leveled the mound. Literally. He made his team dig away every last shovel of dirt, just to make sure he got every last artifact, because that was all he was really after.

This mound is a modern reconstruction, recreated decades later on the same spot as the original mound:

And this is why, whenever we've visited a natural history or art museum anywhere in the world, I often find artifacts from Spiro! Much of what was originally sold to private collectors is lost to time, because it already came with so little provenance that all it would take is one unappreciative grandkid and just like that, it's thrown away or put in a yard sale. But some museums did snatch up artifacts as they were first uncovered, and other private collectors did eventually sell or donate their artifacts to other museums. But apparently even displaying many of these pieces is problematic, because they're counted as funerary objects so the holders of those items have to consult their descendents for permission to display them, but again, who are the descendents of the Spiroans? A couple of nations claim the Spiroans as ancestors, and that's caused so many additional problems that many museums won't even let researchers study the artifacts for fear of running afoul of the law.

Meanwhile, the Spiro Mounds Historical Site, run by the Oklahoma Historical Society, has very few artifacts of its own to display and educate visitors with. It barely scraped together the money to buy the land and recreate the destroyed mounds, and it'll never be what it should have been. Nearly every mound site that I've been to has been the same way, obviously less funded and less lauded than it should be. It's racist, is what it is. There's a national park site for every house that every president used the toilet at, pretty much, while many of these locations of astounding history are left to figure out their own funding. 

Here are all the mounds I've so far seen in person:

• Ocmulgee National Monument
• Spiro Mounds
• Cahokia
• Angel Mounds
• Sugar Loaf Mounds
• Serpent Mound
• Hopewell Culture National Historic Park
• unnamed mound at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
• Alligator Mound

Of the ones that I still really want to see, apparently Hiwassee Island is mostly inaccessible, but there's Etowah in Georgia, Toltec Mounds in Arkansas, and Moundville Archaeological Park in Alabama. There's also this totally bonkers book that I got the public library to buy a few years ago--the author definitely believes that angel/human hybrids are buried in the mounds, BUUUUUUT he lists all these minor mounds that exist in backwoods and down old country roads, etc., and sussing all of them out would basically be my most epic summer ever.

With that and my apparently new hobby of getting chiggers in old cemeteries, I can *probably* keep myself entertained when Will goes off to college!