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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Mounds
  • Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:59:36 -0600


Very interesting, like the Atlantic article linked, but I don't see the
connection in this post to our list subject. There is no mention of
agriculture or the products or uses of their agriculture. I'm trying to
leave a lot of leeway here out of consideration for everyone, but we really
need to connect our posts to our list subject.

I'm aware of the forced boarding schools history, and it's shameful, but
that has to be discussed somewhere else. I could go into the history of
Indian uranium miners and the town near us in NM, Paguate, that has only
old women of that era because the men died, or their oral history book
"Memories Come To Us In The Wind And The Rain". But I can't; that would be
off topic.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 8/6/2006 at 10:09 PM firekeeper@netscape.net wrote:

>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.
>
>http://www.webdyer.com/artifacts_fossils/points.htm
>
>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 a
> fter 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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