Word: mounds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Kolomoki Mounds State Park in southwestern Georgia gets its name from several Indian mounds, relics of a forgotten people who lived 600 years ago. One of them, recently excavated by Dr. William H. Sears of the University of Georgia, is called "Mound D" by archeologists. What the Indians called it may never be known, but the tale of its building must have scared many generations of prehistoric children. Mound D was the scene of the goriest funeral ever held in the state of Georgia...
Carefully, layer by layer, Dr. Sears stripped the mound, which was about 25 ft. high and 100 ft. across. He found it sprinkled with skulls, like a fruitcake studded with raisins. Says Sears: "It has more dead people put into it in funnier ways than any mound in the Southeast...
Ancient Point Four. About 1300 A.D., Sears decided, a thriving village surrounded the site of the mound. Its 1,000 inhabitants lived around a ten-acre plaza. At one end was a low earthen pyramid with a temple of some sort on top. The Kolomoki people were prosperous; they raised corn, beans and squash, probably imported at some earlier period from the high civilizations of Central or South America...
...Mound D Village was not like its neighbors. By some sort of "cultural exchange" (perhaps traders, slaves or refugees from the Weeden Island people in Florida), it acquired newfangled ideas that originated in the civilizations across the Caribbean. One item in this ancient Point Four program was the technique of making elaborate, artistic and useless pottery for ritual purposes. Another, unfortunately for the villagers, was an inkling of a grisly religion, dark with human sacrifice and priestly tyranny, which was often a feature of the high Indian cultures...
This dangerous seed sprouted strongly in the Mound D village. Generation after generation, its priests grew more despotic. More & more elaborate grew the curious pottery that was the ritual furniture of the religion from across the sea. Some of the pots represented animals, both realistic and stylized. Others were abstract shapes like Japanese lanterns or spheres pierced with holes...