Looting Spiro Mounds; An American King Tut’s Tomb
by David La Vere
The University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
Paper, 262 Pages.

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.