SPIRO
For a time, between A.D. 1000 - 1200, Spiro was perhaps the most important & powerful of a group of at least 15 Mississippian political-religious centers in eastern Oklahoma. Located on the first terrace & surrounding upland along a bend of the Arkansas River at the intersection of the temperate forest & the Great Plains, it was a natural gateway between societies to the east and the west and was one of the major trade centers in native North America, with its elites controlling exchange & communications networks that expanded westward & northward onto the plains & across the southeastern U.S.
Occupied as early as A.D. 800, reached its peak around A.D. 1000 - 1200, abandoned by 1450
Site covers nearly 100 acres
At its peak consisted of a sizeable village (occupying an upland ridge & portions of the adjacent bottomlands) & two sets of earthworks
One set of earthworks build on the upland ridge and contained a ring of eight mounds erected over the remains of burned or dismantled special buildings; the other set consisted of three mounds built on the bottomlands
The largest of the mounds is Craig Mound (33 feet tall and 400 feet long), a composite mound of four joined mounds built over some 500+ years to cover burials (more than 700) of Sprio's elites - burials contained spectacular artifacts (including objects of wood, cloth, copper, shell, basketry and stone)
Unlike other Mississippian centers, Spiro never fortified by either a stockade or moat
From A.D. 1200 to 1400, a large community developed on the uplands and terraces around the Spiro site - few, if any, people actually living at site itself with the mounds visited periodically ritual & ceremonial activities, including burial of elites & attendant mound construction
Site abandoned by late 15th century & by mid-16th century, Spiro's descendants living in hamlets scattered along Arkansas River subsisting on a mix of farming & bison hunting
The people at Spiro imported a vast aray of exotic goods (raw materials as well as finish products) and their artisans fashioned them into a wide variety of elaborately decorated objects, including ceremonial cups, batons and other symbols of status and authority. Conch shell and copper were favored materials & artisans used a variety of techniques (including engraving & embossing) for depicting elaborate dance & gambling scenes, stylized pictures of warriors, and renditions of various (presumably) mythological creatures, including spiders, serpents (both winged & antlered) and cats - all iconographic elements that later became important in the mythologies of historic southeastern tribes. Exotic goods found at Spiro include:
conch shells from western coastal Florida
copper from the Southeast and other regions
lead from Iowa and Missouri
pottery from northeast Arkansas and Tennessee
quartz from central Arkansas
flint from Kansas, Texas, Tennessee and southern Illinois
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To comment on this page please send mail to Chuck Smith at crsmith@cabrillo.cc.ca.us
Last modified on 7 March 1998.
