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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Mounds

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  • From: firekeeper@netscape.net
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Mounds
  • Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 22:09:30 -0400

Hi Art
 
What your are observing about the points is very interesting, I have a site below to help on the idenitification.  The ID will tell you what specific group it was.  It can be confusing even to tell if the indiginous people that live near you are the same tribal group, because the names that archeologists gave are rather, err, unsubstanciated on occasion.  Not only that, but the peoples who were removed were often so wrangled through the forced boarding schools that the few that survived those places had no oral history left to carry away and know what they returned to.  My own family endured this so I know how completely our culture was erased.
 
 
What I do know is that your whole area had been taken over somewhere after 700ad by colonists from the Aztec empire.  While oranized on imperial lines and still connected with Mexico, they ranged far into the upper Mississippi and centered themselves in Cahokia.  They brought a mound building culture to replicate the Sun-worship of The Aztec religions.  You Picture isn't really big enough to show if there was a nearby site of suhc a great, stepped mound..  In that culture these small mounds would have been near a great mound.   The more egalitarian Woodlands groups that had been there prior to the Mississippians did build mounds of various sorts.  You may be guessing in the right direction about these being the homesites, the would have been lodges and longhouses, rather than teepees, which were further west, or the mounds could be burials or a religiously significant grouping.  The Mississipian culture lost it's connection with the Aztecs, though we have no idea when.  But after that point the regional people did began to take back all these lands and many portions of this culture broke away into their own. Eventually, little was left for DeSoto to bring his warriors and diseases into.  Between disease and removal there is little left to connect these mounds to the peoples that made them.  Just from a glance at the overview I can tell that some efforts had been taken in the surrounding properties, that your mounds were erased past the borders of that property.  This probably would have happened when people first took this area for farming and it is the general fate of all mounds.  The new Americans actively destroyed them whenever they found them, either from ignorance and wanting flat farming, or active hostility to the previous culture.  Just reading the history of efforts to save some mounds will tell you how completely some people sought to overwrite the past of these places.  Identifying the potshards and the points will tell you more than I can.  If you wish to, you can ask your local college archological class into it.
http://www.sacredland.org/historical_sites_pages/miss_mounds.html
<<What I circles there is about a 10 acre pasture.I lived on the road right in front of the land when I was 6 years old. As far as I know the land has
never been plowed so the mounds are just like the people left them. Most of the mounds are about 2' high. Most are 40' to 50' across. A lot of the land
in this area is low and during heavy rain water stands on a lot of it. They had to build the mounds to get up out of the water.
I suspect they predate the Native Americans we know but I can't prove it. I found a couple of arrows on one of the mounds
that are not the same as all the other Indian arrow heads I have seen. The points of the arrow head is cut in a way the air will turn the arrow and
help it to shoot straighter.

Most of the pastures in that area that have never been plowed has these mounds. There is a 40 acre plot 1/4 mile West of the one I circled in the
photo that has probably 200 mounds on it and this is just a couple of plots out of several in the area that still has the mounds. Can you imagine the
work it took to build just one of these mounds. Every ounce of dirt in these mounds was carried by hand and dumped on the mound. There was no other way
to get the dirt there.

There are several plots of land in this area that have never had the mounds in my lifetime and they are level. I figure this is land that was tilled by
who ever lived on these mounds. >Art>>




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