It
is the biggest city that you never heard about. It may well have been the
second biggest city in the world somewhere between 1000 and 1250. Cahokia was
bigger, but you’ve heard of it. We do not know what the population of Spiro was,
partly because it may have been a ceremonial center for pilgrims who came but
did not stay permanently. Why, then, have you never heard about it?
The
city today is called Spiro, in eastern Oklahoma. Spiro is not on the way to
anywhere. If you go any further north or east you end up in the Arkansas River.
The area is poor and rural even by Oklahoma standards. But it was a center of
prosperity and activity eight hundred years ago.
I
visited Spiro Mounds in June 2023 (see the video here).
They are hard to find. Even many local residents have never heard of it, and
those who had could not give coherent directions to find it. We ended up using
the Siri app. The day I was there, there was a family visiting. The rest of the
time, it was just me and the director of the visitors’ center, who was not at
all hopeful that the State of Oklahoma would keep the site running. The biggest
remaining mound, Craig’s Mound, is an artificial reconstruction [photo].
I
wrote earlier about Cahokia in Illinois and posted a video. All that
remains of Cahokia are large earthen mounds built by Native Americans, one
basket of soil at a time, in which bones and artifacts were buried.
Warrior-priests lived in wooden structures on the flat mound tops. For square
miles around the main mound (now called Monks Mound), workers (slaves?) lived
in huts and grew vast fields of maize (corn, unknown at the time outside
America) and other crops.
The
Cahokia and Spiro empires were connected to the other empires by a vast trade
network that covered most of the eastern deciduous forest. The trails were of
dirt well pressed by thousands of feet. Trade goods were carried by hand, as
there were no horses, oxen, or wheels. There was also extensive trade by boat.
Spiro was within sight of the Arkansas River.
Trade
goods were usually high-value decorative items. As far as we know, food was not
usually transported, since the amount needed would weigh too much. Most of the
food in Cahokia was corn, beans, and squash, with venison and “wild” nuts for
protein. In Spiro, quinoa might have been more important than corn.
Remains
of copper, shell, and sandstone artifacts have been found at Cahokia, and it is
possible that perishable items such as clothes and blankets may have been
imported. The shells came from the Gulf of Mexico. The copper came from the
Great Lakes area. Though the Mississippian culture did not extend into Mexico,
there was some trade with the Natives we collectively call “the Aztecs.” The
artifacts on display at the Spiro Mounds Visitor Center were duplicates. The
director explained to me that the location is so rural and high-crime that
leaving the real artifacts in the building would invite plundering. Law
enforcement would take at least a day to respond, after which time the items
would be untraceable.
Nobody
knows why the Mississippian civilization collapsed. There was apparently a
major drought about 1300, but this might not have by itself caused food
production to collapse. There was undoubtedly soil erosion caused by the
intensive agriculture needed to feed the population, although this would also
probably have not caused the collapse. Most likely, it was these two factors
(and others?) working together.
You
cannot see the Arkansas River today from Spiro Mounds, and even if the mounds
were intact (see below) you probably could not. The view of the river is not
blocked by modern buildings. It is blocked by pecan and boxelder trees which
have grown back since European and white American occupation. Native Americans
cut down small trees and used fire to clear away saplings and undergrowth. The
Natives transformed the landscape not only by creating urban centers and by
agriculture, but also by fire.
Even
less remains of Spiro Mounds than of Cahokia. Spiro was sort of a second city
to Cahokia in the Mississippian culture. As a matter of fact, the mounds
themselves are gone. Nobody knows how big the mounds originally were. By the
1930s, farmers and ranchers near Spiro (in what used to be the Cherokee Nation
of Indian Territory) noticed artifacts, some fancy, that showed up when they
plowed their fields or grazed their cattle. The new land owners saw this as an
opportunity to plunder the archaeological treasures and sell them.
The
Pocola Mining Company was the only company whose sole purpose was to “mine”
archaeological artifacts rather than minerals. They had no training in
archaeology. They dug up artifacts and sold them directly to whoever wanted
them. These artifacts went to private collectors and museums all over the
world; some are even in the Louvre in Paris. A few have been located; others
have been discarded by people who assumed they were fake trading-post items
that the old folks left in the attic.
This
plundering of artifacts was illegal under a federal law signed by Theodore
Roosevelt. Since it was a federal law, it did not apply within Oklahoma until
the artifacts crossed state lines—and some of them crossed national lines. But
there was no enforcement of this law.
A
scientist at the University of Oklahoma discovered what was going on, and he
convinced the Oklahoma legislature to pass an antiquities act, one of the first
of its kind at the state level. This might have protected whatever artifacts
remained undiscovered, but the Pocola Mining Company went into overdrive to dig
up everything they could before the law went into effect. They even broke up
some shell artifacts into smaller ones, yielding a higher total profit. And
then, just before they left, they wired the area and blew it up with dynamite.
This was deliberate historical and cultural obliteration.
The
state law protected whatever artifacts survived the plundering and dynamite.
But then the professor went on sabbatical out of state. He was the only one
watching the site, so when he left, the miners came back for more plunder.
We
do not know who these people were. They left no writing for us to even try to
decipher. We do not know what language they spoke or what they called their
city or themselves. Based on artistic similarities in pottery, archaeologists
have concluded that the Wichita and Caddo tribes are the physical descendants
of the mound builders, although these modern tribes have no tradition or memory
of a vast civilization.
Why
have you never heard of the Mississippian civilization? This is the important
question. Everyone has heard of the Mayans (the contemporaries of the
Mississippians), the Aztecs, and the Incas. But popular racist images show
Native Americans north of Mexico as being small populations of hunters and
gatherers, leaving scarcely a footprint as they gathered berries and nuts and
hunted deer. The reason this image is racist is that it justifies the conquest
of North American tribes, who were not using the land to its full capacity, by
civilized Europeans who transformed the landscape into a fruited plain with
whitewashed cities, a process popularly called Manifest Destiny. What is
sometimes called “revisionist history” proclaims the facts about the advanced
Native American cultures. But this new view of history is attacked and maligned
by conservative state legislatures.
The
conservative racist (these are not necessarily the same things) viewpoint has
been triumphant, because if you ask Americans about major precolumbian urban
centers north of Mexico, very few will know anything about it. The myth of the
savage, vanishing Red Man persists.
