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Photo Diary: Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa [1]
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Date: 2022-08-31
The Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa contains a large number of artificial earthen ceremonial mounds built by Native Americans over 1000 years ago.
For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently in Iowa.
The Americas were the last large areas of land to be inhabited by humans. The first Americans crossed over the Ice Age land bridge from Asia to Alaska at least 15,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 25-30,000 BCE, and quickly spread across both North and South America. They are known today as “Paleo-Indians”.
By around 1000 BCE, a group of Native Americans in the Ohio River Valley began burying their dead in artificial mounds, constructed by laboriously carrying basketfuls of dirt and packing them into place. These Adena people were part of a larger cultural era known as the Archaic Period.
By the time of the Early Woodland Period, around 500 BCE, the practice of mound-building had spread to a wider geographic area and the mounds had become more elaborate, and this continued through the Hopewell Period to the Late Woodland. By around 1000 CE, the practice of building mounds had spread from the Great Lakes all the way down to the southeastern US. In places like Cahokia in Illinois and Fort Walton in Florida, many villages and towns were constructed with a low flat central plaza that was surrounded by a series of mounds topped by important residences or ceremonial buildings.
In the area from Iowa to the Great Lakes, meanwhile, many of these mounds had become particularly elaborate and were carefully constructed in the shape of animals. These became known as Effigy Mounds.
There seem to have been four basic types of earthen mounds constructed in the eastern Iowa area during the Late Woodland Period. The simplest of these were basic “cone” mounds that were made by piling up dirt or sand and packing it into place. These usually contained burials, in which the bones of the deceased were often wrapped into a bundle and buried in the mound along with a collection of grave goods. Some mounds contain multiple burials made at different times. A second type of mound was known as “linear”—these were long and narrow and stretched for 100 feet or more. Linear mounds usually did not contain any burials, and likely had a ceremonial purpose. A later method of construction was “compound” mounds, which combined both cone and linear mounds into a single line of structure. And the fourth and most complex type were the “effigy” mounds.
The effigy mounds were carefully planned and constructed. Each could extend for several hundred feet, forming the shape of a sacred or ceremonial animal such as a spider or bird or snake or turtle or mountain lion (there is even an Alligator Effigy Mound in Ohio). Inside the four square miles of the Effigy Mounds National Monument there are over 100 different mounds, of which 31 are effigy mounds. These are mostly in the shapes of birds and bears (the Great Bear Mound measures 137 feet long and 30 feet wide).
When European explorers first reached the effigy mound areas, they were mystified by them. In a silly fit of racism and cultural blindness, they assumed that the Native Americans were too backwards and undeveloped to have made such large structures by themselves, and concluded that some outsiders must have made them instead. This led to all sorts of fanciful tales which were proposed by European naturalists of the time, attributing the mounds as the work of everyone from the Vikings to the Chinese to the Lost Tribes of Israel to the engineers of Atlantis. It wasn’t until serious archaeological excavations began in the mid 19th century, led by the new Smithsonian Institution, that it became universally accepted that the mounds had indeed been painstakingly built by ancient North American Natives, one basketful at a time.
Since then, study has shown that the Late Woodland people who built the mounds were leading a semi-sedentary lifestyle in settled villages, where they raised crops of corn, beans, squash and other food plants and hunted deer, elk, small game and fish. The construction of ceremonial effigy mounds seems to have stopped around 1000 years ago, as the Late Woodlands Culture began to be replaced by the Mississipian.
At one time there were probably more than 10,000 Native American mounds in this area. Today, fewer than 1000 remain. In the 1920s there was a proposal in Congress to protect the mounds (and the wildlife area surrounding them) with a 200,000-acre national park that would stretch from Minnesota to Iowa. By 1949, when the Effigy Mounds National Monument was formally established, this had shrunk to just 2500 acres.
There is a Visitors Center and guided ranger tours, and 14 miles of trails wind their way through the park.
Some photos from a visit.
The park
Visitors Center
There is a small museum exhibit
Artifacts recovered from the mound area
The guided tour begins with the Three Mounds, a group of conical mounds next to the Visitors Center
Our guide was Ranger Liam
One of the linear mounds
Little Bear Mound. The “head” is to the left, and the “forelegs” are to the right.
The Great Bear Mound
The String of Pearls Mounds. Nineteen conical mounds that follow the path of the sun in the sky.
One of the Pearl Mounds
The Pearls lead to a spot overlooking the Mississippi River
The river
Native American prayer flags
Buffalo Pond. A nature path runs along the pond.
An outcropping of chert, used by Native Americans to make stone tools
Garter Snake. The blue eyes mean he is going to shed soon.
American Toad
I think this is a Painted Turtle, but it’s hard to tell through all that glop
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