A Very OK Podcast
Episode 2: “What is Spiro?”
April 21, 2021
Episode Transcript
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. I’m your host, Trait Thompson. I’m executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And with me is Dr. Bob Blackburn, who is the former executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society. And we’re glad to be back with you for our second episode of A Very OK Podcast. Well, how have you been, Bob?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Hey Trait, I’ve been doing great, and you can see by the smile on my face that I’m enjoying retirement. Today I had an official event, and so I had to remember two things: one, how to set an alarm clock. I’d forgotten how to do that in two months, and tie a tie. But today I was up and around on time. I’m enjoying it. I’ve got projects. I’m learning again. I just don’t have to deal with some of the issues that you are now handling. I thank you for that, and I get to do what I want to do now, when I want to do it.
Thompson: You know, Bob never ceases to kind of rub it in. You know, that he has, he’s on the free and easy route. And I’ve still got a little bit of road ahead of me, but I’m enjoying my new job. And we were talking earlier, and you’re booking some vacation time, right?
Blackburn: I am. Going to take my son and daughter- in-law and four-year-old grandson, who is now the center of my universe, and taking them to Scottsdale, Arizona. We rented a house with a swimming pool so the little boy can swim to his heart’s delight. Take my wife to the Desert Botanical Garden. That’s one of the five best gardens in the country. So we’ve got a good week planned for spring break.
Thompson: You know, that’s really exciting, and we booked our vacation. My wife and I, every couple of years, we try and get off on a vacation on our own without the kids. We just booked a trip to Washington to Olympic National Park, and so we’re going to spend about a week in the park doing some hiking and sampling the food there. And I’m really excited about that. And then later in the summer, we’re going to take the kids to Charleston, South Carolina, explore the history there, Fort Sumter area, take the kids to the beach, and I’m really looking forward to that as well. I’ve been doing my travels around the state to some of our different historic sites, and on Friday, I had a really nice opportunity to go to Spiro. And those of you who may not know, we have a great site there. It’s Spiro Mounds Archaeological Site. Dennis Peterson, who’s the director of that site, he does a walk. And the equinox walk happened on Friday, and I happened to go to the evening ceremony. And so you can see, it’s really fascinating. You can see the sun set over the mounds that the mound-building culture built there, several hundred years ago. And Dennis was such an incredible tour guide for that, and he’s such a wealth of knowledge. And with the Spiro exhibit now currently happening at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, I thought it would be great to get Dennis in here, and we could talk a little bit about Spiro and really to answer the question: what is Spiro, and why is it important today? And so I’d like to introduce Dennis Peterson. Dennis is an archaeologist and the manager of the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center. He’s a native Oklahoman. He received his BA in anthropology from the University of Oklahoma and also did his master’s work there. While at OU, he was able to work in various capacities for the Oklahoma Archeological Survey, and he especially worked on the Spiro Mounds excavations that happened from 1979 to 1982. He continued to work for the survey on other projects, including Spiro Mounds, Prehistoric Gateway, Present Day Enigma, an exhibit with the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Dennis loves Spiro, and I think his fascination with this is going to come out in the interview, because I’ve never seen someone who, other than you, maybe Bob, who can talk for so long on one particular topic, but he has been the director of the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center since 1985. We are very happy to welcome him in. Dennis, thank you. You made the drive all the way from Spiro today just for us, and we appreciate you being here.
Dennis Peterson: Thank you, Trait. Thank you, Bob. Good to see you again.
Blackburn: It is good to see you.
Thompson: So let’s start off in talking about Spiro. And before we even get into the culture there, let’s talk a little bit about some of the, you know, we refer to pre-history as really pre-European history in this country. And it’s something that not a lot of Oklahomans, and certainly not a lot of Americans, know much about. But there was a lot going on here in Oklahoma, and particularly in Spiro, before the Europeans ever got here. Dennis, tell us a little bit about that.
Peterson: Sure. You know, in Oklahoma, we have over 33,000 years that people have been in the state. We have over 25,000 prehistoric sites that have been recorded thus far in Oklahoma. Of course, the only one you can actually go out and visit is Spiro Mounds over almost to the Arkansas border on the southern bank of the Arkansas River. What we have, and there’s, when we talk about the past, there’s history, which just basically means somebody has written about the experience in an area. For our area, it’s really not until the 17, 16, 1700s for eastern Oklahoma, 1541 with Coronado out in the Panhandle.
Then you have, going further back in time, you have the protohistoric, which means basically Europeans may be in the area or trading materials into that area, but they aren’t writing about that area. So for Oklahoma, after Coronado leaves the Panhandle, there are mainly Spanish goods coming into the state, both from the east and the west. There’s some from the south along the Red River. Some French stuff is coming in in the 16 and 1700s, but they’re not writing about their experiences all that much. There’s a few explorers who go and kind of traipse around, but they leave behind artifacts from that experience, but don’t really talk about the people they’re seeing or the cultures they’re experiencing. And then you have before that even, the prehistoric, which is actually just culture before Europeans can be in an area, and in our region, that means anything before 1492, really. Well, 1541 really, because de Soto comes into the into Arkansas in 1541, he doesn’t get all the way into Oklahoma, but he has impact on us because the people who kept him from getting into Oklahoma, he called the Tula, appear to be connected to Spiro, at least their family groupings, but they were so forceful he couldn’t get into our area, and he finally dies in southern Arkansas as a result. And then de Soto, I mean Coronado coming across the Panhandle in 1541. So anything before that.
Blackburn: Dennis, I might add one little point there. They did not leave a lot of footprints. Now, you’ll be talking in a minute what has been uncovered. But in terms of the French, they did not leave a lot of footprints, as you say. They didn’t write about it. But what they did is leave their names of the rivers because they needed to know where the Indian tribes were going to be the next season when they would meet and trade. So they said, well, where will you be next spring after your gathering your furs during the winter? We’ll be on this river. What do you call it? Well, it would become the Arkansas, or the Poteau, or the Kiamichi, or the River Rouge, all French words. And so the place names in Oklahoma come from that French period. In a little bit, a parallel will be the Spiroans did not leave a lot of footprints beyond the mounds where you work today.
Peterson: Yeah. I mean, basically, if you aren’t writing about a thing, then you’re leaving impact sometimes by rearranging the landscape, other times by leaving behind the artifacts and materials you utilized. I mean, we have stuff in central Oklahoma that represent the Spanish coming through, not just in 1541, but later as well. Never mentioned, but leaving behind the artifacts, cuirasses, and helms that are left behind. Either because they left them or because the Wichita beat the living dickens out of them and took them for trophies. We have the same thing in the southern part of the state, where the French come in with the Caddo, or into the Caddo trading area, and leave behind French goods, Spanish goods, even English goods that are coming in. And they leave behind fragments of pottery, pipes, things of that nature that we can then date when that connection would have been, but don’t have anybody writing about it.
Blackburn: Well, you have another crossroads in that story that you’re telling here, Trait, is that the influence of those European countries on the tribes who would remain. Like the first time the Osages settle in Oklahoma because a French trader lost their license with Spanish, and he brings one of the three bands of Osage to Oklahoma, and then the influence on the Comanches from the Spanish and Mexican point of view. And so all these tribes are continuing to show the influence of those footprints without those Europeans being here.
Peterson: And that’s a big issue. Most of us have this view of what Native Oklahoma is, based only on those that are removed into the state, but that doesn’t really happen until the 1800s, for the most part. We have a very long cultural history in Oklahoma.
Thompson: Those people were in the Spiro area. That culture developed around the mid-600s and went all the way until probably the mid-1400s or mid-1500s. So, how did that culture develop and those people come to be in Spiro, and how were they connected? Because there were other mound-building sites across the, across the nation. How did that work?
Peterson: Around 700 AD, the US experienced an incredibly lush period of time, much lusher than it has been since. Not just more rain, but a longer growing season, more productivity, huge surpluses, and massive population growth that starts about 700, continued until about 1300 AD. Now, what that means is that from California to Virginia, from the southern half of Colorado to Mexico was just an incredible productivity area. And that meant that the people who were already in eastern Oklahoma, had been for hundreds, thousands of years, suddenly are growing in size from little townlets of 100 people to what ultimately becomes the city surrounding Spiro, which covered five square miles at its height, had over 10,000 people for over a thousand continuous years. Everybody depended—well, almost everybody in the US from 700 through 1500 AD, depends heavily upon agriculture. Almost all the agriculture is done by women. It’s all hand done. There’s not any plows. There’s no horses, cattle, or anything like that. So it’s all by hand. And so all the women are farming, which means every river bottom is your farmstead. It’s where everything is produced.
Now, it also is your connection. It’s your highway. Before Europeans come in, there are only two ways of movement. You either walk, which is never an efficient method, or you took a boat. The boats are dugouts,pirogues. The big transport boats ran from 30 to 60 feet long. Some have sails. Some could hold up to 80 people or more. And you can get anywhere from the Rockies to the Virginia coast, from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Great Lakes in less than five weeks by boat with huge amounts of stuff and people. And that’s what ties together Spiro, not just as a local community, but because that interconnectivity, that commerce that was going back and forth, because it’s not just individuals scattered around not knowing about each other. This is a highly integrated confederation that incorporated over 60 different tribes, over 30 different language groups, directly involved over 6 million people, and controlled everywhere from the Rockies to the Virginia coast, from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the Great Lakes.
Now, mound building is a method of control. Mounds are kind of like the king on the hill. Look at me. I’m better than you are. And there are tens of thousands of mound sites that are created during this Mississippian period as nodes of power, of control. Most of them are single mound sites. So one mound created for a building, that building would operate sort of like a county seat, control ten, 15, 20 towns around it. In eastern Oklahoma, west Arkansas, we’ve got about 40 of those county seats. They in turn are controlled by bigger centers, which operate like state capitals. We’ve got about a half dozen of those. And then those in turn are controlled by the big four, the four regional centers. Spiro, because it controls the Arkansas and through subsidiaries, the Red River Valleys controlled the west. Moundville in Alabama controls the south-central. Etowah in Georgia controls the southeast. Cahokia up in east St. Louis controls the north-central. Now each of those is autonomous but interconnected, and Spiro was the glue that held those connections together. They did so, in part, because of economics. You control the Arkansas and the Red, you controlled, had a monopoly on some things that everybody wanted.
Since the women are the main farmers, they’re using hand hoes. Now, the hoes are usually made out of stone, which means that they’re pretty heavy, and some of the heads of the hoes will a six pounds plus a handle. And that doesn’t sound like much until you’ve been working eight-to-12-hour workday to produce the 85% of the diet the women did. So they wanted something that was lighter weight yet durable and had an edge. The only real thing that we have in the US, because there’s not any smelting that goes on, is the use of bison bone, and especially scapulas, the shoulder blade of a bison. And since that meant that you had a blade that was less than one pound plus a handle, and it gave you the same attributes as a stone did, every woman wanted a bison scapula hoe. However, at that time, the main herd of those bison, you know, those million bison that are up and down the Plains at that time, the main herd is in northern Texas, central Oklahoma, southern Kansas. The big herd of millions of animals moved from northern Mexico up to Canada and back again, but it takes millennia. At the time that Spiro’s in existence, they are in the prime location to control women’s access to a rare commodity: bison scapula and tibia, which are used for like shovels. Hides, furs, meat, and bones become a trade commodity, but it’s monopolized because the only access is through Spiro.
Blackburn: Dennis and Trait, one thing for some of our listeners who are trying to keep track, and this is fascinating, Dennis. I love your understanding of the complexity. But in terms of the time period, a lot of people have traveled around the country. For those of our listeners who have been out to southern Colorado and the Anasazi ruins, you know, at Mesa Verde or some of those. They are prospering at the same time as the Spiroans. They’re benefiting from that same period of lush vegetation. And farther south, the Mayans people have been to Tulum and they’ve been to Chichén Itza and these sites are all being developed in this same time period where the climate has changed and is allowing them to be more productive, more calories ingested, growing bigger families, healthier families, longer lives. And then out of this comes this complex culture. So that maybe will allow some of our visitors to put this into a context of this western hemispheric development.
Thompson: I found it fascinating when I was on your walk where you talked about the women being the primary workers out in the fields. That kind of goes against type. You wouldn’t necessarily think that that would be the case, but that’s pretty fascinating. And then another part of the interesting conversation is some of the activities that it frees the men up to do.
Peterson: Sure. You know, most of us see that TV and movie image of Native America, and that’s, even for the time periods they depict, a good John Wayne movie, while great activity, I love watching them, but they’re not history. When you’re dealing with most of the eastern United States, especially, and other places as well, southwest is one, most of them are, the cultures are matrifocal. That means they revolve around women. The women are the farmers. They’re producing 80 to 85% of the diet. They’re working longer. The households and the communities focus around them.
So they’re matrilineal, meaning that you trace your line of descent, your family, not through the father’s side of the family, but through the mother’s side. It’s matrilocal because when a man and woman got married, the man moves from a different town into his wife’s town and into her home. While you didn’t own land, you had usury over it. That means based on your status and what you needed. You did own the houses, and the houses are really focused around women. So you’d have a grandmother, her sisters and daughters, their sisters and daughters, all living near each other in one community area, a little neighborhood, and then a hundred yards down the road, there’d be another community around another grandmother. And that’s the way the world revolves. But what it means is, is the women own almost everything in the society. They are the economic powerhouses. The men, their contribution, food-wise, is mostly in large meat resources. That’s only about 15% of the diet. In our area, deer, turkey, elk, when you get out in the central part of Oklahoma, include bison as well. But when you’re getting into that part of the diet, it’s only 15%. They’re only working an average of a three-to-four hour workday. Well, women in any society dislike it when men sit too long. That’s why honey-do lists exist.
Thompson: I think we can identify with that.
Peterson: I think all of us can. Not to be mean. It’s just the reality. The women are working, so they expect the men to work too. Well, if the men aren’t actually actively hunting, they tend, because they’re all independents. They’re not living in families of their own, they’re living in their wife’s community. And so the men kind of gather together in the equivalent of town square, which is the plaza.
The mounds at Spiro were in three big groupings, two big groupings, pardon me. The burial mound and two house mounds, which is where the elite structure is down in the bottom, just a few hundred feet away from the Arkansas River, and then up on the terrace, which is at a 450 contour. It’s a little bit higher, is where the two temple mounds and the house mounds for the primary leader are located, and a big open space in the middle, which we call the plaza. It’s a big community area, and that’s where the men would gather. Now, one of the ways that they’d gather is to do ceremonial stuff. While the women dominate the economic areas of life, the men very definitely dominate the religious areas. In the art at Spiro, over 75% of all leadership fancy art found in the Mississippian area is found just at Spiro. Native Americans, before Europeans come in, at least here in the US, when they depict people, they typically do it in an abstract: stick figures, exaggerations. They do that as well at Spiro, but they also do extremely naturalistic forms. So, pipes which are carved, three-dimensional images of people, conch shell engravings, which are the only pan tribal writing system for the US, prehistorically. Copper, conch shell, fabric, basketry, those kinds of things were being brought in, and the art, anyway, depicts people as they saw themselves, a thousand-year-old photo album.
So as archaeologists, which really, most of the time we’re looking at bones to be able to tell us who people were or what they may have looked like, we don’t have to guess. They show us how they themselves saw themselves. This is totally unique in the US to just Spiro and a few very, very rare examples elsewhere. That also means that we can talk about people not just in the abstract as a group, but as very specific people and roles within the society. The Great Sun, the primary leader, is depicted in the art. Also, when they end up interred in the burial mound, they get buried with the materials that showed that status, their power. And because of the excavations in the ’30s, we are able to go and understand how that relates to individuals of great power. Normal people are not going to be buried at Spiro. They’re buried in cemeteries close to their town.
Thompson: So I want to get into that a little bit, because I remember when I was on the equinox walk, one of the things that you talked about is that everything is spiritual at Spiro and in that culture, and here, we don’t typically understand that very too well because we tend to bifurcate our spiritual existence, and then the rest of our lives. We go to church on Sunday morning. We might have time during the day that we might pray or do some other things, if we’re practicing whatever religion we might practice. But the rest of the day, we kind of tend to live our lives, and we may not think as much about it. I would really be interested to hear more because there, everything was spiritual, and you talked a lot about the importance of the sun, and then getting into the reason for the mounds and how that played into their spiritual lives. I think it’d be fascinating to hear more about that.
Peterson: How we view ourselves is still with a spiritual component. It’s less so now. It has been kind of diminishing since the Reformation, but it’s still a very big part of who we see ourselves as being. It’s just not as big as the folks at Spiro. In their understanding, everything around you has spiritual power: alive, dead, animate, inanimate doesn’t matter, it all has power. But they have positions of power. So the sun, the great sun, or the sun, the spiritual and the physical orb, is the most powerful spiritual entity in the Mississippian tradition. Now, there are some groups that have a creator, man never seen on Earth, who creates everybody and then isn’t in the system anymore.
But the sun usually has that role. He’s the head of the council of the Upper World. He is also the one that when the people here on Earth have problems, they try to connect with. And for the Mississippian, that was a big thing. Everything around them surrounded them, permeated their being. And how does spiritual power get tapped? How do we manipulate it? And who is it that’s going to be able to manipulate those forces? For the primary leader, the person who would be the equivalent of the president, they’re referred to as the Great Sun. The French referred to the Natchez example as the Grand Soleil. The Great Sun, basically. Anyway, the understanding is, is that this is kind of like the pope. He’s the intermediary between the spiritual world and especially connected to the sun and the mundane, or this world. Now, on this world, there would also be a representation of the sun in every one of the temples in the eastern United States. And that representation is what we call the sacred, or the first fire. It burned in every temple. They treat it just like a person. It never is allowed to let go out. It’s always burning year in, year out, centuries, and centuries, and centuries. And that sun, or that symbol of the sun, is where you go, and you give it tobacco. You pray with it.
At the vernal equinox period is when you’re getting ready for planting ceremonies. So plants that are getting ready to be planted, they’re going to be given bits of that into the sun or the first fire because that sanctifies it. And then after that point, you can plant those crops, and then, it goes on for each of the four quarters. You have communication with the sun by the primary leader on that set solstice and equinox series. Every three months, the sun appears in either its extremes, which are the solstices. The sun at the winter solstice is its furthest point in the southern form, so it sets way south. And for Spiro, that’s important, because when the primary leader wants to connect with the sun, he does it at these critical periods where the sun is either at its extremes— summer solstice or the winter solstice— and, or, at the autumnal or vernal equinox, where the planting or the harvesting ceremonies take place. At those four times, the sun is at critical phases, so that the primary leader, the Great Sun, can connect to that spiritual focus, the sun. You have the symbol of the sun, which is the first fire, which burned in the temple. That’s a fulcrum. That’s the anchor. And then you’ve got the the physical form of the sun.
And in between are three mounds: House Mound Six, where the winter solstice took place, the summer solstice on House Mound Three, and so on House Mound Two, both the vernal and the autumnal equinox is where it aligns, too. So when that alignment occurs, that allows for the sun, the temple, to be in alignment, and then the primary leader is right in between. So he gets all that spiritual power. Think of it as kind of like an Indiana Jones in the when the Ark of the Covenant is open and all that energy comes out. This allows for him to be able to go and focus that energy on him. For three days of celebration, a ceremony would take place. He would cleanse himself because anything you eat could influence you, because it still had ceremonial connection. And that meant that you first either smoked sacred tobacco, swallowing the smoke, making you throw up, or you drank black drink, which is a highly caffeinated drink with, I think, Ilex vomitoria, American holly, boiled into it, which makes you throw up, getting rid of that. And for three days, no food, no drink, no sleep. Constant prayer and communication with the sun. At the end of that period of time, the primary leader, the Great Sun, would come out of being sequestered, go to the temple, and inform everybody else what the sun tells them needs to be done. If things have been going well, he says, you guys are doing a good job, but here’s the little tweaks we need to do because the sun tells me this. Or if your things are going badly, he says, here’s who made up, made the mistake. This is how we get it on track and make things better. And it works.
Thompson: So Dennis, after the Mississippian culture was successful and prosperous for several hundred years, what ultimately led to its decline?
Peterson: When you have that time of plenty, that’s 700 through 1300 period, the leaders are saying, the reason for all this good stuff, it’s us. We’re the ones communicating with the spiritual world. We’re manipulating those forces. We’re the ones who are coordinating all you ignorant farmers because, you know, you’re just farmers, and we’re the ones who are creating the storage facilities so that when you inevitably make a mistake, and you will, we know. We have storaged food so that we can go and fall back on them until we fix it. And it works. The people are saying, man, the world is great. We have huge surpluses, lots of people. We have interconnection between two-thirds of the United States and trade all the way to the Gulf of California. What could get better? And it really couldn’t.
Unfortunately, around 1300, the US goes into an environmental shift, a drought cycle. Bob was talking about the Anasazi, and the Hohokam, and the groups that are down in the southwest. They’re being affected at the same time the folks at Spiro are. It’s a drought cycle. It’s not a lack of rain as much as it is a change in the simplicity. In the pattern of rainfall, instead of having your rain falling along a long pattern, early spring, late fall, now you end up with these heavy torrential rains. The drought cycle that we’ve been in in the US since the 1970s, it’s almost identical, almost exactly the same as what we experienced at 1300. And that one was over a 100-year drought cycle, not a lack of rain, again. It’s just the pattern shift. And for bottomland farmers, they need that predictability. When flooding occurs, the earlier period, it was kind of minimal flooding. You got deposition of soil, which rejuvenates the soil content, keeps it plush so you get lots of surplus. But in a drought cycle, usually your heaviest rain is late spring, early summer, and it either strips out the crops you’ve already planted, or it dumps so many silts on that it rots them in the ground. Doesn’t take long before folks say, what’s going on? You’ve got, you’ve been telling us all this time, and we’ve been paying you to do it, is to control the environment, and you ain’t doing your job. So what’s the deal? Well, the leaders start looking for excuses.
All of human history revolves around environmental shifts. It really does. Because most of our political systems develop when we have stable environments, high surplus periods, population growth, and elites gain power that way. Also, most political structures collapse because leaders are no longer seen as effectual in controlling the environment. That’s what predicates the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese. All are part of the perception of elites no longer in control, and why do we need them? And it usually causes upheaval. Well, that’s what happens with the Mississippian. The political structure is unable, through the religious and political system, to be able to manipulate the forces of nature. And the folks eventually lose confidence in the elites. Everything falls apart. Mounds, specialized ceremonies, specialized art, those are all about that 10% or less of the populace that controls stuff. But if you don’t believe in those folks anymore, mound building, specialized ceremonies, specialized art falls by the wayside. The national connections, you know, the people are saying, I don’t need you. I can farm in that river valley over there where we haven’t had anybody in a couple of generations, and they start decentralizing. The city of 10,000 in Spiro goes to about 3,000. The elite structures are eliminated. The people who are there are still there, but there are smaller numbers. They’re still farming the bottoms, but they’re also farming a little higher elevation, less production, but more reliable. The national connections down to Florida, the Great Lakes out west, falls by the wayside because that was mostly about who’s in charge, about fancy stuff like copper and conch shell, coming in for the elites to show off. And if you don’t believe in them anymore, those things aren’t needed. That happens throughout the eastern United States.
As Spiro and the other major Mississippian sites lose their power, the focus goes less on that national confederation, and more on local manipulation and control. The same kind of thing happened all through the southeast, so it became a local focus, sometimes regional, but mostly local. One river valley, two river valleys, and then the Natchez in the lower Mississippi Valley continue a lot of the behavior for the elites up until the 1760s, ’til the French and the Choctaw beat the living dickens out of them, but they don’t hang on to the full range of behavior that we see in Spiro. The Choctaws, and the Cherokee, and the Muscogee, and the Chickasaws, and all the groups in the eastern US that had been a part of the Mississippian, they cherry-picked. They picked this piece because it adapts to them. It fits their needs. But that other stuff, we don’t need anymore. And that’s what we end up with. That’s why most of the groups that end up being removed in Oklahoma in the 1800s have connection to Spiro, mainly through that religious and political connection at 1000, 1300, 1450, up in that period of time.
Thompson: So, Bob, let’s fast forward a little bit, and Spiro declines in about the 1400s, 1500s. And it, the land, the tribes from the east come in, and the land is given to the Freedmen from the Choctaw Nation. Correct, Dennis?
Peterson: At Spiro Mounds, yeah, uh huh.
Thompson: And so, in the 1930s, we have the Craig Mound, which is named after one of the Freedmen families who farmed in that area. The Craig Mound is discovered. Bob, can you talk a little bit about the archaeological digs that happened there? And then how does OHS get involved in this site?
Blackburn: Well, we had a director at the time. He was director of research. He would not be the equivalent to what you and I have been here, but he was the director of research and named Joseph Thoburn. He wrote the first survey history of the state of Oklahoma in 1907. He would write another series of books in the 1930s, but he was a journalist, self-taught, self-taught archaeologist. Very typical of the time. When we hear about discovering, you know, the tombs in Egypt, these are generally gentlemen, you know, self-educated explorers. But anyway, Joseph Thoburn learned a lot. He was looking around the state for sites that he thought that might be prehistoric. Many of his assumptions were wrong.
But while he is out there looking around, Spiro Mounds really comes into focus with him. And the Oklahoma Historical Society has a minor role at that point. OU, and Dennis can tell us the story of the private companies that go in and start mining these. And unfortunately for us, those private enterprises who get ownership, or at least a lease, go in, and they may find a large plate, but they can get more for the shards than they might for the large plate. So they break it up and then sell it on the open market at a time when people want to buy artifacts from Egypt or ancient Europe. And so it becomes a free enterprise endeavor for a while, until the state, and with OU stepping in. And then long term, when it comes back to a state park, local legislative leaders say this is important enough. And even though the Corps of Army Engineers would own the site, they work with the State of Oklahoma, originally the tourism department, and that’s who Dennis worked for. And then in 1990, they would shift ownership of the leases, if you can own a lease. But we had the leases, or the State did, transferred to the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the facilities there that are on state-owned land.
That’s when I met Dennis in 1990. We worked together for 31 years on this. But Dennis, I think that story of the private enterprise phase, when these artifacts were scattered around the world, and then going in and stopping that with that antiquities legislation; why don’t you share that story?
Peterson: Sure. Well, you mentioned Joseph Thoburn, and we’re lucky we had him because in 1913 and ’14 he was out there surveying around, as you mentioned, and he came across Spiro, because he was actually looking at these prairie mounds, which are natural erosion or lack of erosion features in eastern Oklahoma. And he said, that’s cool, but can I dig there? And the family who owned the land, the Brown family said, no, you can’t. We don’t want anybody disturbing it, because that’s our farmland. And so he was persistent. 1916, he comes out of the site, and he actually gets permission from them again to dig the two small house mounds, which are called the Ward Mounds, dug into them, because he had a belief that these prairie mounds were all earth lodges like the Pawnee had built up in the northeast, north central. He took photographs of the site. So we have photographs of the burial mound, and the main temple mound, and a couple of others before they were ever disturbed.
The area had been farmed by Choctaw Freedmen. So, after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Act required giving land and property to the ex-slaves of the South. The only place that’s actually enforced is here in Indian Territory, and the area that we call Fort Coffee, which is on the northern end of the Choctaw Nation, Moshulatubbee District, that was where those allotments were done. So starting in the 1870s, the Choctaw Freedmen started clearing and farming the land, and they continued to farm it up until the 1960s, at least where we’re at.
In 1933, a local group calling themselves the Pocola Mining Company— they weren’t miners, they weren’t a company. They were just six guys out of work during the Depression and got a hold of the lease on the burial mound. Two years, from ’33 to ’35, is how long the lease was going to be. They paid 50 bucks a piece for that lease, which doesn’t sound like much to us, but in the ’30s, that’s a lot of money in Oklahoma. And the family who owned the land was under dire straits. And they said, okay. And so in 1933, these six men and their helpers, this starts in November of ’33, started digging into the burial mound. Now, they originally dug in the burial mound, at least from an interview I did with one of the diggers, actually, not one of the original owners of the lease, but one of his cousins that actually was the shovel hand. He said the reason they got the lease is because they believed that was where the Spanish gold was going to be hidden. It’s this big hill of dirt next to the Arkansas River. Nothing else around it. And occasionally, the people who were farming the land would come up with human bones. So they said, this fits the story, which is told in every county in the state, but doesn’t exist in any of them.
So they got to ahold the lease, started digging into the mound because they believe that was where gold and silver was going to be, but they didn’t find any. Instead, they found bones, and stacks of cloth, and bushel loads of seed pearls, and copper, and conch shell, points. Everything you can imagine which was initially of no interest to them. I mean, they were using some of the bones and thousand-year-old cedars they were finding as firewood during the winter of ’33 and the spring of ’34. But once local folks start coming in to see what they found, and not seeing gold or silver, but thousands and thousands of artifacts strewn along the flank of the mound said, you know, I’ll give you a nickel for that or a dime for that, which wasn’t much money even in the ’30s, but it was enough to keep their families fed. So from 1933 to ’35, these six guys and their helpers destroyed about a third of the burial mound, about 400 burials, and sold hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of items to collectors, museums, and universities all over the world.
I mean, literally, anywhere you go in the world, there will be something from Spiro in a collection nearby. We’ve identified at least 45, I mean, pardon me, 65 public facilities in the US alone that have materials. From the Smithsonian to UCLA, University of Chicago to the University of Texas, all over Oklahoma and Arkansas, overseas, in places like the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, National Museum in Germany, the Hermitage in Russia; there’s stuff in Yugoslavia, Saudi Arabia, Buenos Aires, Beçin, Japan, Taiwan, Korea. A little museum outside Jerusalem has stuff, and it’s because Spiro was so different, and because the artifacts were so prolific. Back in the ’30s, it was called “the King Tut of the West” because nobody has ever seen anything like it.
Thompson: You don’t find these kinds of artifacts at any of the other Mississippian sites, correct?
Peterson: A piece here and a piece there. I mean, you’re talking about millions of these artifacts at Spiro, whereas say, Cahokia, that’s the New York City of the time, has maybe a couple of thousand, and a smaller mound site, say, over outside of Muskogee, there’s a mound site underneath the lake, but it had maybe three or four items of this nature. I mean, very small numbers. And so the volume, the artistic sophistication, the preservation of perishables. I mean, there’s more fabric preserved at Spiro than any other single site in the nation. The only prehistoric lace preserved in the US is from Spiro. More basketry, you name it, there’s more of it there, and because it was available, everybody wanted it and could get it. And it forces Oklahoma in 1935 to pass the first antiquity laws for the state. It’s actually a licensing law, said, yeah, you can dig it, but only if you get a license from the Department of Anthropology at OU, which Dr. Clements was in charge of. And he said, unless you’re me, you’re not going to get one. And the commercial diggers didn’t like that, of course. They were kicked off by Dr. Clements, actually kicked off, and then they came back after he left and dug some more.
But finally, in the spring of 1936, the University of Oklahoma got a hold of the lease on the mound. They used WPA labor to start scientific research of what remained of the burial mound. They had to do it with WPA labor, and to do that, that meant they had to have some cash. They didn’t have enough money. And that’s when the Oklahoma Historical Society, the University of Tulsa, and private donors like Frank Phillips of Phillips 66 fame came into the picture. They ponied up the dollar bills to allow for the university to do the research. And they were very good partners. Actually, Dr. Clements, in order to keep things going, would have these trips from Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and people would come out with him to tour the mounds. There’s a couple of movies, home movies, that Clements had that are of people coming out in cars, 1930s cars, and walking across the mounds and picking things up, putting them back down. There’s also a film in 1938 by the WPA when they did a film on their excavations. So they did a documentary, which is a great film. In fact, they show it at the Cowboy Museum right now. It’s one of their touch screen things. It’s really a good program to talk about, but the neat thing about the WPA excavations is that it’s really some of the earliest archaeology in America. I mean, where it’s actually seen as a science. I mean, it’s nothing compared to what we do today, but compared to the commercial digs, it was an immense leap forward. The university ended up shipping all that material mostly to OU. That’s why OU has the largest collection of materials in the nation, actually, in the world, of Spiro at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History now. And this is back when the student union was still in construction, and they had the processing down in the basement. And they said, I interviewed several guys who were on that crew, artists on it, and they would come down there. They’d clean things up. And anything that was really unusual, like the pipes and things like that, when they finished for the day, they put it in the unfinished elevator shaft down at the bottom, and then they’d close it up. They’d go home, and they’d come back and fill it up. I’ve always wanted to go in the bottom of that elevator to make sure nothing got left behind. I’m sure it hasn’t, but that was always a question I had in my mind.
But OU ended up excavating, not only completely the burial mound, it was part of the lease agreement. The family who owned the land said when this is done, it has to be flat because we need to farm this land. I mean, it’s the size of a football field. It’s over 350 feet long, over 115 feet wide. The highest point is 34 feet. And like all the other mounds, it’s a man-made accretional mound, meaning it’s built not all at once, but layer upon layer upon layer, over an 800-year period. Over 1,100 liters, millions of artifacts are interred there. And so they excavated that completely. They also looked at the other eight mounds that they knew of in the 1930s. All of those have portions still intact—some more, some less—that we have preserved here at the site today. And then in 1978, we opened to the public as the first and still the only prehistoric site people can visit. The land itself, in the 1960s, the Corps of Engineers put in the navigation system: the Arkansas, Oklahoma, the Arkansas River Navigation Project, and which transforms Oklahoma from a landlocked state into an international port state. And when they did that, they put in the W. D. Mayo Lock and Dam right next to where the burial mound was, just a few hundred feet away, really. At that time, the Corps purchases the mound site, or part of it, because they believe they’re going to make it into a federal facility.
Now, from about ’64 up until 1970, every year, they came up with money to do another study, but never seemed to come up with the money to implement any of those studies and make it into a federal facility. In 1970, the state said, because of the Oklahoma Archeological Survey and the state parks system, said, well, if you guys won’t, we will. And they took out, they took over the long-term leases. Actually, the state bought another 10 acres of property so that we could develop our own areas and close off the access, fence around the property, and stuff. Of course, it took Oklahoma until 1978 before they finally opened the park on May 9, 1978.
Since that time, in 1979 through ’82, we renewed our research, found the last three mounds. Hadn’t been noticed before, hadn’t been noted, at least in the maps. And so we found House Mound Five, House Mound Six, and Dollop Mound. And House Mound Five was partially excavated in ’79 and ’80. The other two have been left completely alone and will remain that way as long as I have a say, because archaeology is a destructive science. You dig it today. You cannot dig it again. It’s gone forever if you dug it once. So it’s important to save some of the site for future because the technology is continuously changing. In fact, although our major excavations have stopped since the 1980s, since ’82, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Arkansas have restarted research at the site. It’s a joint project between the two schools to be able to use remote sensing—new technology, which allows for energy to be shot into the ground and measures rebound. So you kind of have a—think of it as kind of radar, only it’s a lot of different technologies, and it gives us what we call anomaly patterns. So, dense areas usually reflect more of the energy, less dense areas, so a dense area would be like a house floor. A less dense area would be like a pit, or a burial, or a pothole for posts. And so, what we found is that there’s a lot more going under the surface that we couldn’t see on the surface in archaeological terms until we get this new technology.
In fact, around 1350, because of the environmental change, there is this desire to jumpstart the society again. Things of the old are no longer working, and the elites are saying, man, these old stuff, the things that we’re using, these ceremonies, obviously it’s those things’ problem. They don’t have enough power anymore, but they are important, so we have to retire them. Sorry, Bob, this isn’t for you. But you’re going to put them into the burial mound, and there’s actually a prepared area. It’s like a little house that was built on top of the burial mound at that time. And then all the stuff from the temple is reverently moved from that location into this little building. And then they close it up. They cover it with mud, and then they, slowly but surely, build up burials around it. That’s where a big amount of material, what’s called the Spirit Lodge or the central chamber, was created at that time. But what that means is, is that we have a huge amount of area material that was so well-preserved. Well, when that ceremony took place, when that 1350 retirement of the old, an attempt to jumpstart anew began, that must have been a huge ceremony. Tens and tens of thousands of people would have shown up, more than the local community could have housed. And what we found in the anomaly patterns are all these very temporary, very short-term, probably less than a month, buildings being built. We don’t know much about it.
In fact, this last, back in 2020, OU was going to do a new field season to test what was going on there. Of course, that got postponed because of COVID. Now it’s looking like 2022, we’ll be able to have that field season—fingers crossed. But we’re hoping to be able to look at these anomaly patterns, what looked like small houses, small buildings that are like hotel rooms. You come in. You sleep in them. You don’t cook in them. You don’t leave anything behind. And when you leave, you pull up the walls, and you go home. And they’re so short term that in an archaeological term, we can’t see them. But because we have this remote sensing data, we know they exist. So we can be very careful. And if we get it in just the right light and just the right moisture content on the soil, you can see those posts that have been, they were there for a month, but 700 years ago, you had a temporary building there. It’s amazing research, and we’re working on that right now.
Thompson: Why is Spiro important in the context of Oklahoma history? And why is it important that people be able to go to the site, learn about this culture and its relevance to us today?
Blackburn: Well, I think there’s so many things we can talk about, but something Dennis talked about earlier was constant change. You know, all these tribes through the last, you know, several thousands of years have all moved. They moved with the environment. They moved with aggression or whatever it might be. Is that we need to remember that history is really a story of constant change. And the more we understand about the changes, the causes for the changes, why people are moving, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities, how do people come together as a community, why do they disperse as a community? The more we understand about us. Because human nature is the same. Dennis also talked about the plaza areas. Well, you look at southern culture town squares. If you look at the Anasazi, you have the plazas with the kivas. You know, human nature is human nature. Going back tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, we can learn more.
And because the Spiroans do not speak to us through the written language, we have to find other ways to interpret that, to listen to those stories, to plug it into the bigger story of the environment, of social interaction, of religion, of economic development, and free enterprise, and trade, and transportation; all these stories that are important to us today. The only way we can learn those facts is to do what Dennis has been talking about, slowly and methodically and with patience, trying to get bits and pieces. And it’s frustrating. People want instant results, especially in today’s instant society of information. But you cannot talk to the Spiroan culture people that easily. So we have to make sure that we take the time to look at this so we understand what happened then. And to understand the Spiroans will help us understand more about American Indians today, Indian culture. You know, people say, oh, we’re resurrecting Indian culture, and we’re resurrecting tribal sovereignty. Well, we’re not. The tribes never gave up sovereignty. They have been, in their own minds, sovereign people. Their government may not be visible. It may not have a courthouse. It may not have elected people in the 1940s and ’50s, but they’re still Chickasaws and Cherokees thinking of themselves as a community, sense of sovereignty. And if you want to really understand the evolution of American Indians, to understand them today, and these issues of sovereignty, and shared jurisdiction, and criminal law, that’s right now before the Supreme Court or understand how we work together on free enterprise. We can learn so many lessons by looking at how these societies have evolved to where we are today. So to understand us today, we have to understand the land run, of course. We have to understand statehood. We have to understand the Great Depression, World War II, the defense industry, on and on. We need to understand our Indian neighbors. And if we’re really going to get a total picture and understand it, we have to listen to those subtle voices speaking to us through the archaeological remains.
And so today, we still feel like it’s very important to preserve these leases, working with the Corps of Engineers, working with the tribes who have some claim to, as descendants of those people, and to help preserve them and work together as a community to listen to those stories and preserve it and to share it and help people understand that time does change, and the better we become at understanding, the better off will be today.
Thompson: So, Dennis, when we talk about learning more about Spiro and the Mississippian culture, obviously, people can come out to your site out in southeastern Oklahoma near the town of Spiro. But one of the ways that they can do it, if they happen to be close to the Oklahoma City area, is there’s currently a fantastic exhibition of Spiro artifacts at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and this is really a one-of-a-kind opportunity. Can you talk for a couple of minutes about what’s going on at that museum, and why it’s so important, and how long that exhibition will be here?
Peterson: This exhibit that’s at the Cowboy until, I think, the 9th of May, it allows for materials that are at the National Museum of American Indian, at the University of Arkansas, the University of Oklahoma, the History Center, the Gilcrease, Woolaroc, Museum of the Red River. There’s a lot of private individuals that have artifacts from Spiro that have never been noted, or I have never seen. I mean, there’s some beautiful pieces. But even beyond that, Eric Singleton, who’s the curator for this exhibit, has also drawn together an enormous array of artistic forms that are modern artists who use Spiro and other Mississippian sites as their inspiration. The art at Spiro is not just from a thousand years ago. The imagery, the power, continues from that period, and it still is continuing today. Artists like Bill Glass Jr., Knokovtee Scott.
Blackburn: Jeri Redcorn.
Peterson: Oh yeah, Jeri Redcorn. I mean, you name it. We have artists from every one of the cultures, from Oklahoma east, who are using Spiro designs because it helps them connect with their past, their heritage. Spiro is a sacred site for both the Wichita and the Caddo, but it has spiritual and sacred connection with almost all the tribes who end up being forced into Oklahoma. If you do not learn from your past, you are doomed to repeat its mistakes. And I mentioned that the drought cycle that we are in right now and have been since the ’70s, the change of environment is exactly the same as what we saw at 1300. The leaders at Spiro were unable to go and overcome that deficit, that inconsistency. Who knows what that’s going to affect us.
If we don’t see it coming, then how can we plan for how to overcome that problem? And that’s the problem that the people at Spiro had to overcome and basically didn’t. We are as affected by the past as every other culture in the world is. But do we learn from that? Or do we think, well, we’re smarter than they were? And that’s where the mistakes in the past have always been made.
Thompson: And Dennis, we just thank you so much for taking the time to be a part of this. This has been absolutely fascinating. Since I came on here at the Oklahoma Historical Society, I’ve just been enthralled with Spiro. So I appreciate your time and being here. And Bob, I think you’ll agree this has been a great conversation.
Blackburn: I’ve always admired Dennis and his depth of knowledge, and I’ve learned so much from him over the last 31 years, and I thank him for being a public servant. Like all of our employees around the state, we have a lot of passionate people who care about our history, dedicate their lives to preserving it and collecting it, sharing it. And Dennis is one of those that I’ve always admired and will always consider him a friend. Thank you, Dennis.
Peterson: It’s been an honor to serve with you over these years.
Thompson: Thank you for joining us on A Very OK Podcast.
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