Free PDF Looting Spiro Mounds: An American King Tut’s Tomb, by David La Vere
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Looting Spiro Mounds: An American King Tut’s Tomb, by David La Vere
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How an ancient North American civilization was plundered in the twentieth century
When a group of relic hunters drove their picks into a lost Indian burial crypt in eastern Oklahoma in 1935, they unearthed a vast treasure trove of Mississippian art—considered by many at the time to be America’s answer to King Tut’s Tomb. They also ignited a controversy that continues to have repercussions throughout archaeological and American Indian communities.
The Spiro Mounds contained some of the most impressive pre-Columbian Indian art ever found. In Looting Spiro Mounds, David La Vere takes readers behind the scenes of this discovery to re-create a Great Depression–era archaeological adventure worthy of Indiana Jones.
The looting of the mounds is considered one of the major archaeological tragedies of all time. Today Spiro artifacts are scattered among the world’s museums, with some still circulating in the antiquities market and eagerly snatched up by collectors. La Vere weaves a compelling story of grave robbers and lost treasures as he pieces together the puzzle of the civilization that thrived at Spiro from A.D. 800 to 1450. He plumbs the mystery of why the people of Spiro abandoned the site, leaving behind their treasures but no forwarding address.
Looting Spiro Mounds explains what the continuing mystique of Spiro artifacts is all about as the book uncovers a controversy—and a mystery—that lives on to this day.
- Sales Rank: #511212 in Books
- Brand: Brand: University of Oklahoma Press
- Published on: 2007-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .65" w x 5.50" l, .83 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Looting Spiro Mounds is no dry summation of some obscure archaeological site. It's a rollicking account of the seemingly inexplicable looting of a once-great ancient American Indian town. La Vere weaves together the historical facts of the ancient American Indian mound Builders with the more recent backstory of the grave robbers and the archaeologists involved, making this book an entertaining read and a valuable resource." Timothy R. Pauketat, author of Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians "This is one of the most riveting stories I've ever read. Every Oklahoman and every student of Indian history will be richer for reading this gripping and detailed account of the looting of Spiro Mounds." D. L. Birchfield, author of Black Silk Handkerchief: A Hom-Astubby Mystery
About the Author
David La Vere is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and author of the award-winning Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory.
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A Cautionary Tale of Archaeology and Hard Times (From Ahadada Books)
By M. Hori
David La Vere's Looting Spiro Mounds has the informality of a great afternoon conversation at the local coffee shop. La Vere is the guest who knows just about everything there is to know about what used to be termed the "Southern Death Cult" but is now called, less dangerously, the "Southern Cult"--a complex of artistic motifs, architectural styles, burial characteristics, and ritual behaviors among North American Native Americans dating from around the first century A.D. Archaeologists call this the Missisippian period, but most people of the 19th and 20 centuries knew this as the time of "the Mound Builders" and invented all kinds of strange tales about Europeans, Egyptians, Extraterrestials and just about everybody else building the massive structures at Cahokia, Etowah, and Spiro, Oklahoma--the subject of this book. La Vere gives us the low-down on just what went on at Spiro, beginning all the way from the first paleo-Indian inhabitants to the final ritual actions of a handful of elite rulers and priests who built a remarkable burial chamber in the center of the largest mound before abandoning the city c. 1450 because of radical climate changes. La Vere speculates that the creation of this tee pee within a tee pee-shaped chamber filled with "power" objects and the bones of powerful ancestors was a last-ditch effort to somehow focus the sacred energy of the group and adjust the weather back to within more manageable parameters. When the prayers and other rituals enacted atop the mound did not have the desired effect, everyone gave up and left.
As La Vere tells us the story of ancient Spiro that archaeologists have patched together, he also recounts a cautionary tale (really a tragedy) of archaeology and economics that took place in the 1930's when a group of down-and-outers decided to create a mining company to recover saleable objects from the Mounds. Depression-era American witnessed the rise of arrowhead collecting as a hobby along with big-budgeted local museums eager to purchase impressive examples of "Indian" artifacts for their shows. Laudably, La Vere points out the paradox that a mere fifty years earlier the American government was busily stamping out the last traces of Native-American culture, yet somehow prehistoric artifacts--dating from before the time of Sitting Bull, the Trail of Tears, Tecumseh and the other "trouble makers"--had become fair game for amassing and display. The end result of this dangerous mixture of available money in a time of general poverty, with a dash of the anti-intellectualism celebrated in American culture, was the spectacle of these uneducated half-dozen men destroying the great burial chamber at Spiro to sell the incredible artifacts that they haphazardly recovered for mere pennies on the dollar. In addition, to keep the Oklahoma state archaeologists from recovering more material, they spitefully dynamited what was left of the chamber. We will never know for sure what the original burial chamber was like though La Vere give us all the details of what those who were actively involved saw. No photographs were taken. No drawings were done. The opening of the mound was just--apparently--a scrimmage of greed. Think of all the information that was forever lost.
Some impressive artifacts were recovered, however, and photographs of these are included in the book. I was most intrigued by the fact that examples of 500 year old cloth were found and preserved.
This book is lucidly written in an attractive, informal style. Mr. La Vere can tell a story well--even one as saddening as this.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Very impressed on this book on the Mississppian civilization
By Alexander
This book was very informative on the western Mississippian citystate from the middle ages in North America. I had no idea that such a civilization with earthen pyramids existed in Oklahoma from the time period of 900-1400 AD.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Four Stars
By The Facts Man
A good read.
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