Spiro's Craig Mound Great Mortuary looted for shells and copper

October 31, 2026USAGeneralShare

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Key facts

• Spiro, in northeastern Oklahoma, had over 10,000 people at its 14th-century peak, with at least 12 earthen pyramids, an 80-acre grand plaza, hundreds of rectangular multi-family houses and a chunkey court.
• Occupation began around 800 CE as a farming village on the Arkansas River; pyramid building started around 900, at the same time as Cahokia's first pyramids.
• Plum Bayou ceramics appear in Spiro's earliest pyramid phases, as do Coles Creek ceramics from eastern Louisiana, giving Spiro a pedigree from two earlier pyramid-building cultures.
• Spiro marks a decline around 1200, connected with Cahokia's abandonment, then rebounded into its peak between 1250 and 1350 with long-distance trade ties to Moundville and Etowah.
• By around 1000 CE Spiro had a far-reaching western trade network: tens of thousands of Olivella shell beads from the Channel Islands off California and green obsidian from the Pachuca mines north of Mexico City, the only known Mesoamerican artifacts in the Mississippian world.
• Spiro never built a palisade wall and its houses were larger multi-family structures; its region is termed Caddoan Mississippian.
• Art included Braden style copper and shell pieces, marine shell carvings with piasa and underwater panther motifs, a wooden deer-antler mask, humanoid spiders and hands with eyes in their palms; weapons included thousands of color-grouped arrowheads, 30 axes with copper heads and wooden handles carved with birds, stone effigy axes and long-nose copper ear ornaments.
• In 1933 George Evans sold the Spiro land to the Pocola Mining Company for $100, and for three years miners dug artifacts out of Craig Mound, a group of four mounds under a final cap containing dozens of graves and the Great Mortuary, a shaft tomb dug from the top with cedar-trunk walls and a floor covered with mats and textiles.
• The sealed chamber preserved perishable materials that were destroyed on exposure to air; witnesses reported feathers and textile fragments blowing around the excavation.
• The Kansas City Star called the chamber the 'King Tut of the Arkansas Valley'; the University of Oklahoma with CCC crews cleaned up Craig Mound in 1936, revealing its construction sequence - a single burial mound and charnel house, then four mounds with buried charnel houses, the Great Mortuary added in the late 1300s, and a clay plaster cap around 1400.
• Since NAGPRA, the Caddo Nation and Wichita tribe have been recognized as Spiro's direct descendants and some burial goods have been repatriated.

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