Were Southeastern Towns also Sited According to the Stars?

 

 

The surprise of course is that the culture used abstract ideas for siting their mounds and indirectly their communities.  The usual and reasonable assumption of such sites been tied to geography as dominant elsewhere proves completely wrong.

We already know that the South East USA was linked directly to the Maya in much the same way as England was to Virginia.  Even that their culture survived contact into the eighteenth century.  What is now becoming apparent is the likely extent of this culture in the USA.  Again tens of thousands in population.

What i find interesting is the earliest date for coastal occupation.  it was 1150 BC. We already know that 1159 BC, a mere decade earlier, saw the demise of the Atlantean trade world both globally but critically in the Atlantic Basin.  This meant huge coastal tsunamis.

Thus we are looking at successor populations moving in to take over shell fisheries after this calamity.  A thousand years later we hear of the advent of the tale peopels which may well have been part of the Mayan contact.

Recall earlier postings in which i suggested that evacuating Atlanteans including their tall allies in North America may well have traveled to Olmec Mayan country after 1159 BC.

I also suspect that the coast saw minor subsidence as well related to significant subsidence of the Bahama Bank which is as large as France.  All this plausibly collapsed a huge population as well.  While we are at let us not forget ley lines in Bronze Age Europe.

Were Southeastern towns also sited according to the stars?

May 11, 2016 Richard Thornton 

http://peopleofonefire.com/were-southeastern-towns-also-sited-according-to-the-stars.html

 

The archaeological news headline this week is that a 15 year old youth correctly predicted the location of an previously unknown Maya city by matching the sites of known Maya cities with a star map.  It has always been a mystery what determined the location of Maya cities.  Those in the mountains, such as Waka, Palenque and Bonampak are associated with shoals on rivers, but elsewhere, they seemed randomly placed. 

Several POOF members wrote me last night and asked if the same phenomenon occurred in the Southeast,  or at least in Georgia, Southern Florida, Western Mississippi and Southeastern Tennessee, where there were so many towns are in close proximity.  The current answer is that no one has studied that question on a regional scale in the Southeast.

A Yale University astronomer, Dr. Vance Tiede,  did study Ocmulgee National Monument in 2004 and state that he thought that the locations of mounds and satellite villages there seemed to be the map of a constellation.   However, he did not name the constellation.

 

Ancient town sites

Until this past three years,  when I began intensively studying the  archaeological reports of Archaeologists Robert Wauchope and William Sears, I did not realize how really old the town sites were in North Georgia and extreme Southern Florida.  In both regions, most date back to the Late Archaic or Early Woodland Periods. They were occupied for many, many centuries.  Several in Georgia were occupied most of the time from at least as early as 1000 BC to the late 1700s or even the early 1800s.   As we mentioned in an earlier article, this longevity breaks all the orthodoxies of American anthropology.  This phenomenon is also seen in some Southwestern Florida towns, but exposure to the Spanish ended their occupation in the late 1600s or early 1700s.

The most promising location in the Southeast for being laid out according to the stars in a constellation is the former capital of the Calusa People on Mound Key near Fort Myers, Florida.  The island was initially an oyster bar, utilized by the ancestors of the Calusa as early as 1150 BC.  Around 0 AD, the Calusa began expanding the bar into an island for permanent habitation.  These construction projects seem to mark the arrival of another, extreme tall, ethnic group, who became the permanent elite of the Calusa People.

Over the centuries, the man-made island grew to about 120 acres and contained canals, shell platforms for elite housing and shell mounds for temples and the ruling family’s residences.  The commoners lived in massive communal structures shaped like pup tents.  Early Spanish explorers saw the same type structures in certain provinces along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.  Thus, some Calusa probably migrated to that region in the past.

The virtual reality image above portrays the capital of Calos at its peak size.  The Calusa Civilization collapsed in the early 1700s due to European diseases and Spanish repression.

Mainstream references reflect the uncertainty by Florida academicians toward the etymology of Calos and Calusa.  They might consider the purchase of Creek-Seminole dictionaries. Calos is the Creek word for star and the Creeks called these people, Calosi, which means, “Children of the Stars.”   If anyone would have laid out their towns according to star maps, it would likely be the Children of the Stars.

 

Probable appearance of Calos around 1500 AD.

 

The Ortona town site near Lake Okeechobee is another strong candidate for being laid out according to a star map.  It was first settled during the Early-Middle Woodland Period along a series of shoals on the Calusahatchee River like many Native towns in Georgia, but as seen below, the plan of the town does not seem to relate to geography, but to an abstract concept.

 

In the Creek Motherland

All but one of the major town sites in North and Central Georgia have something in common. They are located on the shoals of major rivers.  Robert Wauchope found conurbations of towns and villages that stretched for seven miles long on the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River and 12 miles long on the section of the Chattahoochee River that flows through Metro Atlanta.

When Maya specialist and archaeologist, Garth Norman, visited the stone ruins at Little Mulberry River Park (Gwinnett County, GA) in April 2016, the rangers told him that they have found almost continuous stone ruins along the entire 40 mile length of the Mulberry-Apalachee River System.  It is all white water.  People of One Fire teams have observed a similar phenomenon along other white water tributaries of the Oconee River.

 

Site 9JK54 was rediscovered in 2013, using LIDAR scans.  This 3D computer model was developed form the LIDAR image and portrays the visible structures of a three mile wide Apalache-Creek town along the North Oconee River in NE Georgia. There were probably many small buildings in between the large structures.

The largest towns in the Southern Highlands and Piedmont are found where major trade paths crossed the shoals of rivers.  This is especially obvious at Ocmulgee National Monument, Etowah Mounds,  Carters Bottom (Kusa), Columbus, GA-Phenix City, AL and Augusta, GA.  Clearly, these towns were sited and then prospered for pragmatic reasons, not arbitrary alignment with a star maps.

There is one glaring exception . . . and it was what made me start studying the regional placement of towns.  The town site called Shoulderbone Mounds is located in Hancock County, GA at the southern edge of the Piedmont.  The small stream that served it would have been barely large enough to provide drinking water.  It is currently believed that the town was founded around 1150 AD, right after the acropolis at Ocmulgee was abandoned.

 

The Shoulderbone Site (Okvte~Ocute) around 1250 AD.

 

The Shoulderbone Site (Okvte~Ocute) when visited by Hernando de Soto in March 1540.

Shoulderbone contains the second oldest five sided mound in the Southeast . . . the oldest being the Kenimer Mound in the Nacoochee Valley, which probably dated from around 600 AD to 800 AD.   Why would such an important complex be in the middle of nowhere and not be associated with any major riverine or ground trade routes?

 

Both principal mounds at Shoulderbone and Etowah Mounds are five sided.  Just on a hunch, I used GIS to extend a True North from the center of Mound A at Shoulderbone.  I then used the same technique to extend the alignment of Mound A at Etowah Mounds northeastward.  Etowah’s alignment approximates the azimuth of the Winter Solstice Sunset.  The two lines intersected somewhere at the state line between Georgia and North Carolina at the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River.

They are never mentioned in nationally published archaeology books, but there are a cluster of Native America town sites with mounds on both sides of North Carolina-Georgia Line along the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River.  The best known is the Koweta (Cherokee) or Coweeta (English) Mound, which was built about a mile north of the state line in the Late Mississippian Period and abandoned in the 1600s.

While the Koweta Creeks have always claimed that region, which is known as Itsate Gap as their homeland, the Coweeta Mound is now officially labeled by North Carolina archaeologists as a Cherokee.  Even though Ani-koweta is the Cherokee word for the Muskogee-Creek People, University of North Carolina academicians have determined that Koweta and Coweeta are ancient Cherokee words, whose meanings have been lost.

I drove up to the Northeast corner of Georgia and asked around the town of Dillard, if they knew of a mound right on the state line.  That’s where my Etowah and Shoulderbone lines intersected.   Most folks knew about the Dillard Mound.  It was a classic oval Lamar Culture mound on the river just east of Dillard.  However, a few folks told me, “Yes, there is a mound right on the state line just past the bridge over the Little Tennessee on the right.  We call it the Otto Mound.”

By golly, there it was, a five sided mound right where those two vectors intersected.  Further study of the side with infrared imagery revealed that it was aligned at the same angle as Etowah’s Mound A and was a scaled down mirror image of Mound A and its plaza.

I uncovered a 1989 archaeological survey from the Western District Office of the North Carolina State Archaeologist Division.  It stated that during the Middle Woodland Period, the village was occupied by people making Hopewell Style pottery.  However, during Late Woodland and Mississippian Periods, the pottery styles were identical to those found in the Etowah River Valley, 103 miles to the Southeast.  The site had been abandoned around 1600 AD then reoccupied for about four decades in the 1700s by Cherokees.

Using GIS again, I marked the center points of all known five sided mounds in Georgia, Southeastern Alabama and Western North Carolina.  They formed a triangular matrix that was about 250 miles across.  Why or how these five-sided mounds were sited so precisely over such a long distance is still in the realm of the unknown.

And now you know!