The mounds at Etowah were made by people of one of the regional branches of the Mississippian Culture. They were built between 1000 and 1550.
Etowah is about 60 miles northwest of Stone Mountain.
The mounds are flat-topped pyramids with four sides. The largest is 63 feet tall — as tall as a six-story building. It covers three acres at the base. Its top once held a temple and the ruler’s residence.
The ancestors of the Muskogee people built the mounds at Etowah, though there has been some confusion. There are mounds throughout Georgia. When Europeans asked Native Americans who built them, the answer was usually “our ancestors.” It was assumed that the ancestors of all Native peoples had built mounds.
The border between the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples in Georgia was fluid. When Hernando de Soto visited a town called Itaba in 1540, he was among the Muscogee. When the English settled Georgia almost 200 years later, Etowah was in Cherokee territory.
Since visiting the site, I’ve wondered about cultural identity.
I had thought of the Mound Builders as an earlier people and was curious about how the historical tribes, such as the Cherokee and Muscogee, had emerged as distinct groups.
That’s not a good way to look at the picture.
If you were a Martian explorer and visited New York in the 1800s, you might describe the New Yorkers as a horse-and-carriage culture. If you were another Martian explorer and visited New York last week, you might describe the New Yorkers as a car-and-subway culture. But you’d be muddled if you worried how one culture had replaced the other, or how one had emerged from the other. It’s the same people who’ve adapted to new technologies.
The Mound Building culture was a broad identity which included many groups with distinct customs and languages. The culture they shared was agriculture — many diverse peoples learned to grow beans, corn and squash. The agricultural technology included beliefs about how gods and spirits nurtured or damaged those crops.
The largest mounds in the United States are at Cahokia, Ill., near St. Louis, Mo. Archeologists have found trade goods from the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, evidence of a vast trade network. They’ve also found the remains of people who were sacrificed.
The large mounds at Cahokia might remind you of the even larger pyramids in Mexico.
This broad culture was declining before the Europeans arrived. When de Soto and his troops marched through Georgia, the Native people were interested in their technology — especially the firearms and horses.
• Sources: Lewis Larson, “Etowah Mounds”; New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Oct 13, 2021. It’s here:
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/etowah-mounds/
The website for Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site is here:
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