Litter Burials from Spiro’s Great Mortuary Reconsidered

Summary

Artifact color has both chronological and symbolic significance at Spiroan burial sites in the Arkansas River drainage of eastern Oklahoma. In this paper, we examine litter burials from the Great Mortuary and the Brown mound at Spiro. Ethnohistoric descriptions are used to suggest color symbolism in Spiroan ritual displays. These data are compared with color usage in earlier burials at Spiro and mounds elsewhere in the drainage. We wish to determine whether the Great Mortuary was the culmination of a long-standing burial program or if there was a distinctive change in symbolic ritual compared with earlier Arkansas Valley grave periods.

Cite this Record

Litter Burials from Spiro’s Great Mortuary Reconsidered. Scott Hammerstedt, Amanda Regnier, Sheila Savage. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 404919)

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Keywords

Geographic Keywords
North America - Southeast

Spatial Coverage

min long: -91.274; min lat: 24.847 ; max long: -72.642; max lat: 36.386 ;