#mound builders

[bolaneno]

engraved shell cup decorated with the Birdman effigy, Spiro Mounds site (Oklahoma)

[grungletungus]

Mississippian Hand and Eye

The cultures that thrived along the Mississippi River from 800 to 1600 CE, used a beautiful motif that I’m obsessed with. A hand with an eye. Anthropologists believe it represented a doorway to the milky way, which souls travel after death. It’s often depicted around entwined rattlesnakes, representing the rulers of the underworld, which the soul must escape along its journey. The hand eye also represents the constellation european cultures refer to as Orion.

[taphappy52]

today i received my ancestral markings/inchunwa/ᏓᏆᏙᏪᎸ. i am so so happy with how they turned out. they feel like they were always there and just waiting to be uncovered. i feel honored to have had kii johnson (@/hodokiijohnson on insta) as the practitioner who gave me my markings. we had a beautiful day together, along with a couple of friends. (shoutout to ashely and penguin at mothership tattoo in auburn ca (@/mothership.tattoo on insta) for providing a wonderful atmosphere and taking these photos!) it was honestly perfect.

i made these custom vans and a matching lighter case to gift them. these markings are absolutely priceless and so precious to me. i am so incredibly proud and excited for this new chapter of my life, wearing my commitment to my community and culture front and center every day, and to be a part of the indigenous southeastern tattoo revivalization movement.

[1five1two]

[inspofromancientworld]

Cahokia

By Herb Roe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9614331

Across the Mississippi River from modern day St. Louis the Cahokia Mounds mark the site of a Native American city that existed from about 1050-1350 CE and covers about 9 square kilometers. Within this area are about 80 manmade mounds, though the city at its largest covered 16 sq km and had 120 earthworks that came in a wide range of function, shapes, and sizes with a population of upwards of 20,000 people living in it. It is the largest pre-Columbian earthen construction north of Mesoamerica.

While there is evidence of people living in the area dating back to the Late Archaic period, about 1200 BCE, what we know now as Cahokia began around 600 CE, during the Late Woodland Period, with mound building beginning around 800 CE. While there is no written record, the people who lived there left symbols on pottery, shells, copper, stone, and wood. The complexity of the community they built lets us know that they had a sophisticated society and culture that maintained trade connections from the Grate Lakes to the Gulf Coast.

From about 800-1000 CE, those living in the American Bottom, or the floodplain of the Mississippi River, settlements were usually between 50-100 people, with '[a]t least two of these larger clusters [being] present at Cahokia, one dating to the mid-7th and 9th century'. Gradually, people began building along the cardinal directions and other cosmologically aligned works as well as evidence of specialization and larger groups. This coincided with several groups settling near each other that marked the beginning of Cahokia. During the 900s, maize was introduced to the site, though most of the crops were those that were from the Eastern Agricultural Complex of the woodlands of the area.

By Herb Roe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17127682

Around 1050, Cahokia underwent a 'Big Bang' with 'three urban precincts: St. Louis, East St. Louis, and Cahokia were all constructed at this time'. A city grid developed, oriented along dozens of mounds, 'accompanied by a homogenization of material culture (e.g. pottery and architectural styles) that divided the smaller settlements beforehand'. Settlement spread toward the eastern uplands. Some of the mounds were built on previous settlements, possibly by descendants. All the villages were turned 'into mound centers, or were depopulated to become just a few households or a single farmstead'. The construction of the mounds required the excavation and transportation of about 1,600,000 cubic meters of earth by hand and basket over a few decades. The area had ceremonial plazas that were smoothed out flat around mounds that had flat tops with stairs leading to the tops. These mounds would have wattle-and-daub buildings with houses around the plazas that held thousands of people whereas at most, 1,000 people might have lived in the area before, with up to 15,300 people in the central 1.8 sq km area.

By https://www.flickr.com/photos/prayitnophotography/32434956237/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=144794523

It also was possibly a site of religious pilgrimage, with non-local pottery appearing in higher frequencies as the 'Big Bang' began, with groups from areas such as the Ohio Drainage, the Lower Mississippi Valley, the south-central plains, and the Upper Midwest. Many of these people moved into the eastern uplands. There, they produced textiles and intensively farmed the area, possibly 'supplicant behavior directed towards the central urban core of the city', which 'have been argued as essential to the creation of the character of Cahokia as a city'. Some of the evidence of this includes sweatlodges and 'complexes involving tobacco, red cedar, agricultural produce, and female Cahokian flint clay figures. Intense public rituals, like the sacrifice of dozens of women at mount 72 and internment of powerful leaders in ridge top mortuary mounds'.

By Herb Roe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19158593

Not only did Cahokia receive products, it also exported products, such as hoes, which were in high demand and made from chert, or fine grained sedimentary rock, that was imported from southwestern Illinois and spread as far as Red Wing, Minnesota, as well as possibly serving as a hub for goods to pass through. Despite this trade, the area eventually struggled to feed the people who lived there, which was made worse by droughts that lasted from 1100-1250. Removing waste was another problem, with potentially polluted waterways. It might have eventually tried to attract a 'steady supply of new immigrants; otherwise, the town's death rate would have caused it to be abandoned earlier'.

Other contributors to the decline of Cahokia include the fire that burnt down the East St. Louis precinct sometime between 1160-1170 with '[m]ultiple ritual structures that were filled with an unusual density of stone tools, exotic materials, and pots filled with shelled maize were included in this burning'. This might have been 'unrest in response to 12th century inequalities'. The area was rebuilt, but not with residential buildings. Around 1175, the 'first iteration of the large central palisade around Cahokia's core' was built, around the time people started 'leaving the city in larger numbers beginning in the late 12th century'.

During the late 12th-13th century, a lot of changes in how people built, with houses becoming larger as storage pits were moved inside, no more ceremonial buildings being built, ceramic styles shifting, as well as an increase in cord making and solar-themed iconography. Mounds continued to be built during this time at a reduced rate, though there was an 'increase in cemeteries of grouped minor-elites outside of Cahokia'. Several of the existing mounds 'were ritually capped and ceased to be modified afterwards'. Taken together, these seem to show a weakening of the centralized political structures and a change in religious practices. Examination of graves also show that immigrants were buried separately from native residents of the area, which possibly caused 'social and environmental factors combined to produce the conditions that led people to leave Cahokia'.

By QuartierLatin1968 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15392324

In 2015, evidence of two major flooding events was found by studying the sediment from beneath Horseshoe Lake, one roughly between 1100-1260 and the next between 1340-1460. The first explains some of the channels dug into the area, as they would have needed them as well as dikes and levees to control and mediate the effects of flooding. This also could explain the split of farming between the lowlands and uplands, protecting the food supply from potentially cataclysmic floods.

The city was abandoned about the same time as other population centers in the area, along with a larger region that became known as 'the Vacant Quarter', including modern day southern Illinois; nearly all of western Kentucky and Tennessee; the Lower Ohio Drainage in southern Indiana; most of southeastern Missouri excepting the Bootheel; and the Upper Tombigbee drainage in northeastern Mississippi. Research from 2020 indicates that Cahokia reached its minimum around 1400, then a population maximum around 1650, then declining around 1700.

By TimVickers - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5634833

While Cahokia is a Native American monument, it doesn't belong to a single Native American community because of the way it was built up and populated by immigrants from many areas. The Dhegiha Souan migration, which was from Illinois/Kentucky through as far as Nebraska, where the Hą́ke tribe broke into five groups, the Omaha, Ponca, Kaw or Kansa, Osage, and Quapaw, and other tribes moved in there, such as the Algonquian groups, after it was abandoned by those who lived there.

[victusinveritas]

This is the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology map showing the general distribution of mound sites they had identified in the eastern half of the USA by the late 1800s. The red dots indicate areas where mounds, sometimes hundreds, were found. However, they typically then looked only at places that were easily visited: by roads, railways, and rivers. For just one simple example, the entire Gulf coast of Florida should be solid red. Another example: the mountains of NE Alabama has hundreds to a thousand or more stone mounds that were not found until the 2000s.

[occvltswim]

Ancient American Vol. 10, Issue 64: An Egyptian Presence in B.C. America

[mirekulous]

Ephraim George Squier and E. H. Davis, "The Serpent;" entry 1014, Adams County Ohio. Pl. XXXV, Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley: comprising the results of extensive original surveys and explorations, Washington: Smithsonian institution, 1848