Colored Clay Mississippian Mounds

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 10/12/03

Mounds put long-ago culture in new light
By MIKE TONER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

SHILOH, Tenn. -- Shiloh, the scene of one of the bloodiest and most
decisive battles of the Civil War, is now helping reshape the earliest
history of America.
To warring armies of the North and South, the strange, square-sided
mounds perched on a bluff above the Tennessee River were little more
than landmarks in the carnage that left 24,000 dead, wounded or missing.
But that was 1862. Now, the same mounds, already 1,000 years old when
the great war raged around them, are doing for prehistoric America what
"Gone With the Wind" did for cinema. They're revealing the true colors
of a culture that has previously been seen only through the
monochromatic fog of forgotten centuries.
After three years of excavations at Shiloh National Military Park -- the
largest such project ever undertaken in the South by the National Park
Service -- archaeologists have concluded that America a millennium ago
was a far brighter place than most people imagined.
"This mound -- and perhaps other major mounds in the Southeast -- were
definitely colored," said archaeologist David Anderson, kneeling at the
base of a partially excavated 22-foot earthen pyramid.
"As we've dug down, we have uncovered layer upon layer of colored soils
that were used in its construction," he said. "There are layers of red,
orange, green, yellow, gray and white. We're calling this the tiger
stripe mound because of the bands of colored soils."
Archaeologists have long known that the stone monuments and temples of
Mexico and Yucatan were awash in color -- some with painted murals and
friezes the size of modern billboards. Despite signs of color in a
number of North American mounds, the region has usually been depicted as
the drab stepchild of meso-American civilizations.
"This is one of the last major undisturbed mounds in the Southeast, and
what we've found is changing the way we look at other structures like
it, which were once found throughout the Southeast," said Anderson.
"These people went to a lot of trouble to dig different-colored soils
and transport them here to make this a very colorful structure," said
Anderson, who is with the Park Service's Southeast Archaeological Center
in Tallahassee. "I think in the future, many sites from this period will
be portrayed as much more complex and colorful than they are at
present."
Anderson said the excavation shows that the mounds were maintained as
rigorously as 20th century streets and sidewalks -- swept clean and
constantly refurbished to keep the color schemes intact.
Native peoples first built mounds in the United States 6,000 years ago,
but the tradition reached its zenith -- at Shiloh and other locations --
between A.D. 750 and 1600 during what is known as the Mississippian
period.
As people turned from hunting and foraging to agriculture, mound cities
appeared throughout the South. So did North America's first indigenous
political order -- a system of regional and local chiefdoms vaguely
similar to contemporary state and local government.
The Mississippian peoples probably spoke many different languages, but
they shared an agricultural economy based on maize, squash and beans.
They also adopted a similar architecture -- clusters of square-topped
earthen mounds, surrounded by open plazas and villages, all enclosed by
a protective wooden palisade. Based on stone, shell and copper ornaments
unearthed from their graves, they shared religious and cultural beliefs,
too.
By the time settlers arrived, the mound builders had vanished -- a
societal collapse that some researchers blame on European diseases
brought by the first explorers.
Depictions inaccurate
Whatever the reason, the white man's images of the abandoned "Indian
mounds" were shaped by the way they found them -- eroding and overgrown
with grass and trees.
Today, most of the mounds have disappeared, too -- bulldozed for
farmland or covered over by urban development. The few remaining --
including the massive mounds in Georgia preserved at Etowah, near
Cartersville and at Ocmulgee, near Macon -- merely reinforced the
initial misconceptions.
To prevent erosion, most are planted with grass or other vegetation.
Tourists see them as lush green pyramids, not smooth and swept clean to
emphasize their color.
"Every picture we have ever seen of the mounds -- and every image we
have of them -- is probably wrong," said George Smith, associate
director of the Southeast Archaeological Center.
Despite more than a century of archaeological excavations of mounds,
previous evidence of colored mounds was either missed or ignored.
"Most of our attention was focused on the temple or chiefly structures
atop or under the mounds, or burials within these mounds," said
Anderson.
"But today we can read soils better than we could a few generations
ago," he said. "This is a case where the medium -- or the mound --
really was the message."
The first hint of the varied soils used to build the mound came from
ground-penetrating radar, a relatively new archaeological tool, which
enabled the Park Service archaeologists to "see" inside the mound
without actually excavating it.
"We've been taking great pains to make sure we record every detail of
it, because there will never be another chance like this. There simply
aren't any other unexcavated major mounds left. They've all either been
excavated or destroyed."
'A huge undertaking'
Georgia's mounds were excavated by archaeologists in the early 1900s.
The secrets of Shiloh's colored main mound might have gone undiscovered,
too, had it not been for two unrelated developments.
In 1894, the federal government declared Shiloh a national military
park, a move that assured that Civil War era graves -- and
coincidentally the mounds -- would be protected from looters and
development. In the battle's aftermath, some soldiers were actually
buried in the mounds.
Once protected, the mound might never have been excavated had it not
been for another accident of history. The construction of Kentucky Dam
downstream on the Tennessee River, and the resulting barge traffic,
accelerated the erosion of the 80-foot bluff occupied by the largest
mound.
By 2000, Park Service archaeologists decided that if they didn't
excavate it, the mound was certain to slide into the river -- and any
information in it would be lost forever.
Like the pyramids of Egypt and the temples of Yucatan, Shiloh's largest
mound -- a flat-topped 22-foot-high pyramid that stands atop a steep
bluff on the west bank of the Tennessee River -- the earthen mounds of
North America took many years to build.
"This was a huge undertaking," said Anderson. "It must have taken
millions of man-hours for people to find the colored soils they used and
carry it here in baskets. There were probably only a few hundred people
living in this particular location, so the work clearly enlisted people,
perhaps as many as 10,000, from communities up and down the river."
Variety of functions
Archaeologists are scouting the area this fall to see where the
different-colored soils came from.
Anderson said the imposing size of Shiloh's main mound, the 40 acres of
land enclosed behind a protective wooden palisade and more than 100
individual house sites found so far indicate that the site was clearly
one of the dominant chiefdoms of the region.
Mounds served different functions. Some may simply have provided a
platform for public buildings. But Anderson said the largest one in any
complex probably conferred special status on the chief who lived on it
and fulfilled ceremonial functions as well. At Shiloh, archaeologists
have identified four spurts of building -- each with its own soil type
and each probably associated with some "regime change" in the chiefdom's
rule.
Although excavation has been under way for three years, laboratory
research has barely begun. Before they finish, archaeologists will
analyze pollen, wood, ashes, stone chips, soil, and bone to learn from
microscopic traces of a vanished people who they were and how they
lived.
In the woods around the site's seven major mounds, they also have
identified low circular platforms that mark the outline of many houses,
last inhabited around 1400.
Because the house platforms are not threatened by erosion,
archaeologists have no plans to excavate them. They will leave that part
of the site for the future -- and the day when even newer technologies
may reveal answers to as yet unknowable questions.

© 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution






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