Platform mound

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The Kincaid site in Massac County, Illinois, showing platform mounds. Illustration by artist Herb Roe.

A platform mound is any earthwork or mound intended to support a structure or activity. It typically refers to a flat-topped mound, whose sides may be pyramidal.

Eastern North America

A diagram showing the various components of Eastern North American indigenous ceremonial substructure mounds
Ocmulgee National Monument

The

religious
practices and beliefs.

These platform mounds are usually four-sided

mortuary platforms, charnel house platforms, earth lodge/town house platforms, residence platforms, square ground and rotunda platforms, and dance platforms.[1]

Many of the mounds were the result of multiple episodes of mound construction, with the mound becoming larger with each event. The site of a mound was usually a site with special significance, either a pre-existing mortuary site or civic structure. This site was covered with a layer of basket-transported soil and

borrow pits". These pits were sometimes left to fill with water and stocked with fish.[5]

Some mounds were developed with separate levels (or terraces) and aprons, such as

Emerald Mound, which is one large terrace with two smaller mounds on its summit; or Monks Mound, which has four separate levels and stands close to 100 feet (30 m) in height. Monks Mound had at least ten separate periods of mound construction over a 200-year period. Some of the terraces and aprons on the mound seem to have been added to stop slumping of the enormous mound.[6]

Although the mounds were primarily meant as substructure mounds for buildings or activities, sometimes burials did occur there. Intrusive burials occurred when a grave was dug into a mound and the body or a bundle of defleshed, disarticulated bones was deposited into it. Mound C at

shell gorgets. Also interred in this mound was a paired set of white marble Mississippian stone statues.[3]

Interpretations

A long-standing interpretation of Mississippian mounds comes from

historic data on related Native American tribal
groups in the Southeastern United States.

Knight suggests a microcosmic ritual organization based around a "native earth"

autochthony, agriculture, fertility, and purification scheme, in which mounds and the site layout replicate cosmology. Mound rebuilding episodes are construed as rituals of burial and renewal, while the four-sided construction acts to replicate the flat earth and the four quarters of the earth.[7][8]

Platform mounds - other cultures

The use of platform mounds is documented elsewhere in the world, including:

See also

  • Artificial dwelling hill

References

  1. ^ Owen Lindauer; John H. Blitz (1997). "Higher Ground: The Archaeology of North American Platform Mounds" (PDF). Journal of Archaeological Research. 5 (2). Retrieved 2011-11-02.
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-16-072300-1
    .
  3. ^ a b Henry van der Schalie; Paul W. Parmalee (September 1960). "The Etowah Site, Mound C :Barlow County, Georgia". Florida Anthropologist. 8: 37–39.
  4. ^ Gregory Vogel. "Cavanaugh : A Late Prehistoric Platform Mound in Western Arkansas". Archived from the original on 2012-04-15. Retrieved 2011-10-26.
  5. ^ "Alabama Archaeology: Prehistoric Alabama". Archived from the original on 2011-12-23. Retrieved 2011-10-26.
  6. ISBN 978-0-942579-03-1
    .
  7. ^ Knight, Vernon J. Jr. (1981). Mississippian Ritual (Ph.D. thesis). University of Florida.
  8. S2CID 126495746
    .

External links
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