SMPOIRUON DS
NCOIVRILTIHSAATMIOENRICA'S LOST
In 1933 on the eastern edge of the US state of Oklahoma, a group of failed gold prospectors watched as their partner struck a pickaxe into clay. Witnesses say the air hissed as it escaped from a burial chamber that had been sealed for 500 years. The compatriots pushed their way through the debris into a Native American mound, amazed by what they saw. Inside lay unimaginable treasure. Hundreds of engraved conch shells, thousands of pearl and shell beads, copper breast plates, large human effigy pipes and piles of brightly coloured blankets and robes. Newspapers would later call the find an American "King Tut's tomb".
"Nothing like this had ever been discovered anywhere else in North America," said Eric Singleton, curator of ethnology at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. But the treasure soon disappeared.
Spiro Mounds had been unearthed by a group of local men who called themselves the Pocola
Mining Company. The artefacts they discovered were immediately sold around the globe. Spiro's bounty is now spread among more than 65 museums across the US, Europe and Asia, and researchers are still discovering additional galleries and people possessing its riches. Nearly a century later, the incident remains the worst looting of an archaeological site in US history.
This year, 175 pieces were reunited in a travelling exhibition that set attendance records in Oklahoma City, and is drawing new attention to Spiro Mounds, one of the most important and least understood sites in precontact North America.
"I always heard a little bit about it, but we never really paid attention," said Wesley Cloud, a school track coach who grew up in the nearby town of Spiro, which gives the site its name.
In June, he brought a dozen summer school students 30 miles from their home in Stigler, Oklahoma, to tour the archaeological site. The mounds barely rate a mention in textbooks, he said, while noting that some years, nearly half his students have Native American heritage. "This is something they can have pride in."
The story of the long-forgotten Spiro settlement seems particularly timely. It tells of a people desperately trying to adapt to a changing climate that would ultimately destroy their society. And at a moment when interest in Indigenous communities is growing, it's a chance to marvel at the craftsmanship and sophistication of a forgotten nation whose trade routes snaked thousands of miles across the continent. Spiro's treasures include engraved conch shells from the Florida Keys, copper breastplates from the Great Lakes and beads from the Gulf of California.