Spiro Mounds

Spiro Mounds (34 LF 40) is an Indigenous archaeological site located in present-day eastern Oklahoma. The site was built by people from the Arkansas Valley Caddoan culture that was part of the Mississippian culture. The 150-acre site is located within a floodplain on the southern side of the Arkansas River. The modern town of Spiro developed approximately seven miles to the south. Between the 9th and 15th centuries, the local Indigenous people created a religious and political center, culturally linked to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex identified by anthropologists as the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Spiro was one of four regional centers used by the Caddoan Mississippian culture. These four centers were Cahokia, located in present-day East St. Louis, Moundville, in present-day Alabama, Etowah, in present-day Georgia, and Spiro. Spiro was a major western outpost of Mississippian culture which dominated the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries for centuries. In the 1930s during the Great Depression, treasure hunters bought the rights to tunnel into Craig Mound—the second-largest mound on the site—to mine it for artifacts. Without concern for scientific research, they exposed a hollow burial chamber inside the mound, a unique feature containing some of the most extraordinary pre-Columbian artifacts ever found in the United States. The treasure hunt

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).