Spiro Mounds
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Spiro Mounds is a state archaeological park in eastern Oklahoma, near the modern town of Spiro. It is one of the most important pre-Columbian sites in the eastern United States.
Spiro is the western-most outpost of the Mississippian culture that spread along the lower Mississippi drainage area and its tributaries. Like other Mississippian sites, is has a number of large ceremonial mounds, and its inhabitants carried on complicated rituals and possessed elaborate ritual objects. The site was inhabited between about 850 AD and 1450 AD. It was the residence of powerful leaders who directed the building of nine platform mounds and burial mounds over an 80 acre area.
Spiro is part of what archaeologists call the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. The heart of Spiro is an oval plaza area formed by a grouping of six mounds. Here elaborate rituals took place, focused especially on the deaths and burials of great leaders.
Craig Mound, one of the largest at Spiro, was found to be hollow when it was looted by artifact hunters in the 1920s. Craig Mound appears to have begun as a burial house for an ancient ruler that was covered over with earth but never collapsed. Some of the artifacts looted at that time have been recovered and are among the finest examples of pre-Columbian art in all of North America.
Spiro was part of a vast trading network that brought obsidian from Mexico, colored flint from New Mexico, copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the Carolinas, and conch shells from the Gulf Coast. The engravingsof humans, animals, and geometric designs on the conch shells at Spiro are among the most beautiful and sophisticated in the entire Mississippian region.
The Spiro people appear to have been speakers of one of the many Caddoan languages.
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