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
To comment on this page please send mail to Chuck Smith at crsmith@cabrillo.cc.ca.us
Last modified on 7 March 1998.