The world was changing. Severe droughts that lasted decades at a time gripped the eastern part of North America. Large cities with their dozens of earthen mounds were struggling to harvest enough corn and other crops to feed their inhabitants. People of the Mississippian world called on their leaders to intervene.
At one site along the banks of the Arkansas River in eastern Oklahoma, people and objects convened in spectacular fashion to address this crisis. Riches from across North America – copper from the Great Lakes, shells from the Florida Keys and the Gulf of Mexico, and even obsidian from the area around present-day Mexico City – were brought together at Spiro around AD 1400, set up in a sacred tableau, and sealed inside a chamber within a mound, where they remained hidden for more than 500 years.
Spiro was not the biggest mound-site, having only 12 mounds and a population of several thousand. (The largest ceremonial centre was Cahokia in Illinois, with nearly 200 mounds and a population of 10,000 to 20,000 people.) Nor was it palisaded, and nor did its people depend on corn as their main crop, like other centres. But what really sets Spiro apart is this remarkable assemblage of items, the vestiges of a ritual enacted during the Little Ice Age seemingly to restart the world.
The Fifth Shanghai Archaeology Forum