What is happening is that we are mapping the extensive Andean culture to an extant immigrant culture in Georgia. sufficient evidence has been recovered to handily make the case including funerary practices.
Watch the documentary of the peoples of the clouds who sat athwart the east west trade between the coast and the Amazon. It also became a reservoir of knowledge.
We are also now beginning to learn a lot about the andean culture as well..
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The Mysterious Mountain Cliff Tombs of North Georgia
These
hand-dug tombs are virtually identical to those on the eastern slopes
of the Andes in Peru. The only difference is that Gringo archaeologists
have forgotten their existence, since they were first mentioned and
explored by Archaeologist Robert Wauchope in 1939. None of Georgia’s
tomb complexes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
They have absolutely no protection, unless they happen to be on state or
federal-owned land.
Featured Image: The
photo above was taken from another mountaintop about two miles away
with a telephoto lens. Artifact looters built wooden scaffolding to
reach the man-made caves. The tombs were dug out of volcanic rock on
the walls of an ancient collapsed caldera. There are several tomb
complexes in North Georgia that were dug from the upper slopes of
ancient volcanoes. Such geology in Georgia does not normally have
caves.
The
lifestyle, living location, burial customs and clothing of the Apalache
elite, who occupied the Southern Highlands and Piedmont from the Middle
Woodland Period until the late 1600s, were almost identical to that of
the Chapapoya or Cloud People in northern Peru. Indeed, “Swift Creek
pottery” was made in northern Peru for a couple of centuries, before it
appeared at the Mandeville Mounds site on the Chattahoochee River in
southwest Georgia. To this day, the Conibo People of northeastern Peru
wear clothing with motifs identical to that found on Georgia Swift Creek
pottery.
The
Chapapoya People appeared in the eastern foothills of the Andes at
about the same time as Swift Creek style pottery appeared in Georgia . .
. c.100-200 AD. The Conibo People, living downstream from the
Chapaboya have an artistic tradition almost identical to that of the
Creeks in the Southeastern United States, but have different burial
customs than the Apalache and Chapapoya. Therefore, the chronological
and ceramic evidence suggests that these peoples are descended from the
same Pre-Moche Culture . . . not that the Apalache were descended from
the Chapapoyas.
Readership
of the People of One Fire has increased about 2400% in the past three
years, so we will first explain who the Apalache were. Apalache is the
Europeanization of the Panoan (Peruvian) word Aparashi, which means either “From-ocean-descendants of” or “From-Pará-descendants of.” Pará
is the name of an ancient civilization that spanned across Peru and the
Amazon River Basin. It is today the name of a large state in northern
Brazil and the origin of the name of the nation of Peru.
The
“Apalachee” People of northwestern Florida did not originally called
themselves by that name. It was name given them by the Spanish, based
on the name of one village, named Apalachen, which means “Apalaches” in the language of North Georgia. Their real name was Tulahalwasi (Tallahassee) which means “Descendants of Highland Towns.”
According
to explorer Richard Briggstock in 1653, the real Apalaches in North
Georgia long ago founded a colony near the Gulf of Mexico, which built
towns with mounds and culturally was similar to those people in
Georgia. However, eventually, large numbers of immigrants came from the
south, who intermarried with the Apalache colonists and so changed
their language that it was unintelligible to the Apalache and latter-day
Creek Indians. If Florida academicians had bothered to translate the
names of the original towns encountered by the Hernando de Soto
Expedition in 1539 and 1540, they would have realized this. The
capital of the “Florida Apalachees” in the 1500s was Anihaica. This
word is Southern Arawak from Peru and means, “Place of the Elite.” In
fact, all but two of the village names in 1540 were Southern Arawak
words and none of these villages contained “Mississippian” platform
mounds. The people encountered by De Soto were really not the same
ethnic group, who built the mounds near their villages. They were
hybrids.
According to the
long lost, “Creek Migration Legend” documents that I discovered on April
19, 2015 in Lambeth Palace, Surrey, UK , the Apalachee believed that
they had first arrived in North America at the mouth of the Savannah
River and established their first capital where Downtown Savannah is
today. The Uchee were already living in that region and had first
arrived in North America at the mouths of the Savannah, Ogeechee and
Altamaha Rivers.
It is
highly likely that the mound-building “Cartersville Culture”, which
began along the Chattahoochee and Etowah Rivers around 400-300 BC, marks
the arrival of the first small bands of South American immigrants.
They established small villages, which would later attract Conibo
immigrants from Peru making Swift Creek Style Pottery and later, Shipibo
immigrants from Peru, making Napier Style pottery.
The
Itsate (Itza Maya Creeks) Migration legend says that they first crossed
the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and lived in southern Florida near
Lake Okeechobee, but later migrated to Georgia via the mouth of the
Altamaha and Savannah Rivers. Still later, they moved inland to
Ocmulgee Bottoms and the Upper Savannah River. As more and more of
their kinsmen arrived from Mesoamerica, they gained control of the
Southern Highlands. Traders from the Spanish colony of Santa Elena told
English scholar, Richard Hakluyt, that normally were Spanish were forced
to trade with the Apalache living around present day Helen and
Dahlonega, GA and were not allowed to approach the mountainside towns of
the Itsate that were in the higher mountains. In the 1500s, the
Apalache were vassals of the Itsate, but by the 1600s had established a
vast kingdom, in which the Itsates had been subjugated and composed some
of their vassal provinces.
The
engraving above portrays Conibo Indians in Satipo Province, Peru during
the 1800s. The photo below is of a Conibo rock singer “dreaming” of her
future marriage to her boyfriend. Conibos still marry in traditional
costumes.
The
names Apalache, Apalatci (above) Apalatcy or Apalachen appear on almost
all European maps in what is now North Georgia until around 1707. The
Appalachian Mountains get their name from the plural of Apalache in
their language . . . Apalachen. Their culture is described in varying
detail in 16th and 17th century European archives.
Chikili, High King of the Creek Confederacy, told the leadership of
Savannah on June 7, 1735 that the words Apalache and Koweta “meant the
same.” He used the Apalache writing system to write the “Migration
Legend of the Kashita People.” However, for reasons that are not fully
understood, North American anthropologists chose to completely erase
them from the history books.
The
Miccosukee are the descendants of one branch of the Apalache elite. The
Apalache commoners were the direct and immediate ancestors of the
Kowetas, Tuckabachees, Oakfuskees, Apalachicolas and Seminoles. Their
elite and commoners spoke different languages and lived in separate
towns. The commoners spoke proto-Creek languages, but the elite in the
mid-1600s spoke a language that mixed Panoan from Peru and Itza from
Mesoamerica.
In 1658, French
ethnologist, Charles de Rochefort, described the towns and architecture
of the Apalache commoners in detail. They were identical to the
architecture and towns of the Creeks in the early 1700s. In contrast,
De Rochefort described the Apalache elite as living in round houses with
stone foundations on the sides of hills and mountains. These stone
rings and circles can be found in many archaeological sites in the Upper
Piedmont and mountains of Georgia, eastern Alabama and northwestern
South Carolina.
Apalache
commoners wore a plain tunic exactly like the clothing of the Tayrona
(Tairona) in Colombian and the Panoan peoples of Peru. In the 1700s
Anglo-American frontiersmen called these tunics, “Creek long shirts.”
Apalache elite wore colorful tunics or long shirts that were identical
to the “traditional Seminole clothing” that you see in Florida today.
Until the early 1700s, both commoners and elite wore conical split cane
hats that were identical to those worn by the Panoan Peoples of Peru
today.
The mummy of a recently deceased Apalache Paracusi-te is carried along a ridgetop road from one temple to another. The author has found six foot (2 m) wide roads running on the brows of mountains near burial tomb and agricultural terrace complexes that have ancient stone retaining walls on steep slopes and where it was necessary to bridge swales in the natural terrain.
Shared burial customs
During
the Woodland Period (1000 BC-900 AD) the indigenous people of Georgia
typically either cremated or desiccated the bodies of commoners on stone
cairns. The flesh of commoner cadavers were first eaten off by
semi-domesticated Painted Vultures or Northern Caracaras. In some
sub-cultures, the bones were cremated, places in jars shaped like
amphoras and then buried communally in mounds. In other cultures, the
bones were bundled together and buried in either mounds or caves.
Throughout
the Woodland, Mississippian and Early Colonial Period to around 1700
AD, the cadavers of Apalache elite had very different treatment. The
Paracusi-te or High Kings were mummified in a seated position. Just
like as was the custom in the Andes, the mummy of the fallen High King
was carried around on a liter and stored in public view. These mummies
soon began to mold in the damper climate of Georgia and so when too
deteriorated to display, were buried in hand dug tombs on the cliffs of
high mountains.
The
cadavers of the elite Apalache families were also mummified, but in a
flexed position like one sees on the elite mummies in Peru. These
mummies were either buried in hand dug tombs on the sides of mountains
and high hills, or else buried in low, oval-shaped mounds, covered with
cobblestones and a then covered with quartz rocks in shape of an oval or
circle. These oval shaped stone mounds are endemic in the Georgia
Piedmont and Blue Ridge Foothills, even today.
This is a very large royal burial complex in Union County, GA . . . . containing well over 100 tombs . . . on the upper rim of an ancient collapsed caldera. It is near Track Rock Gap. The tombs face the azimuth of the Winter Solstice Sunset, plus extremely high storm winds that blow at this altitude. Photo (1) is of a typical looted tomb among many on this cliff. The tombs were created by removing clay and stone rubble from underneath stable rock strata. An stone quarry was excavated about 200 feet (61m) beneath the tomb complex. The tombs were sealed with igneous stone ashlar walls (Photo 3) that were laid with clay-lime mortar. The walls were then plastered with red clay and then finished with stucco. Visible were white, blue and green colored stucco, as can be seen in Photos (3) and (4). Some of these tombs may have not been opened. The spaces at the top are too small for a human to crawl through and the stone ashlar walls are still intact. Therefore, the People of One Fire will not disclose their exact location. The scale of the man-made caves can be seen from the POOF explorer in the center of Photo (3).
As
readers will see in the fascinating video below, the burial customs of
the Chapapoya People were identical to those of the Apalache in Georgia
and also date from the same time periods. There was definitely a
cultural connection.
Hand-dug cave tombs versus mound-builder burials
\One of hundreds of stone sarcophagi in the
Nacoochee Valley of Northeast Georgia.
Around
800 AD, Mesamerican immigrants into the Southeast, particularly in
North Georgia, began introducing the custom of burying intact bodies.
The Itza Mayas buried their elite in flagstone lined sepulchers that
were often grouped in cemeteries. Itza Commoners were buried under the
floors of their houses. Then the houses were burned. These were
exactly the burial customs of the Apalache Commoners in the 1500s and
1600s, when they were described by the earliest European explorers.
Around 1000 AD Itza Commoner immigrants set themselves up as the elite
over indigenous commoners. The mixed-heritage descendants of these
Mesoamerican immigrants buried their dead in mounds so as to
architecturally affirm their right to rule because of descent from the
Sun Lords . . . hene ahau.
The Paracusi (High Kings) of Apalache were buried exactly like these Paracus People mummies in Peru. Do you see the linguistic connection?
However,
in the core Apalache province, which occupied the lower Appalachian
Mountains and Upper Piedmont in Georgia, the elite continued to mummify
their elite dead and bury them in hand-dug caves or oval shaped
mounds. The only European explorer to provide a detailed description of
Apalache elite burials was Richard Briggstock in 1650. Contemporary
archaeologists in Georgia have generally ignored Apalache towns because
they contain many stone structures and few large mounds, plus they
developed at a low density in one to three mile corridors along white
water rivers. They were very different from Mississippian towns, which
were compact, fortified and focuses on the large mounds of the elite.
The
only professional archaeologist, who showed any interest in the
Apalache hand-dug tombs was Roger Wauchope in 1939. Most of the tombs
in the mountains were looted by local mountaineers, looking for gold in
the 1800s. In 1905, a local mountaineer found eight stone tablets in a
burial cave near Mount Yonah in the Nacoochee Valley. They were written
in Elizabethan English and described the fate of the Roanoke Colony.
Wauchope only found some potsherds in what was probably Eleanor Dare’s
tomb on Squirrel Mountain. However, near the entrance, he found a stone
tablet, which appears to be inscribed with the Apalache writing
system.
Wauchope was able to
find one intact royal burial cave in northern Bartow County, GA . . .
about 13 miles north of Etowah Mounds. The skeleton was in a seated
position and wearing copper ear spools and bracelets. The ear spools
were identical to those found on Chapapoya skeletons. Around the
skeleton were very high quality Swift Creek jars and bowls; shell
ornaments and flint implements. There was just one skeleton. The
Apalache did not practice human sacrifice.
Even
though hundreds of Apalache tombs have been looted in North Georgia,
there are probably hundreds or thousands more that remain intact because
after 2000 to 500 years, the rich ecological environment of the region
has completely concealed their entrances. Many discoveries await those
archaeologists with intellectual curiosity.
Featured BBC documentary series: Lost Kingdoms of South America – S1 E1
In
this fascinating program, you will also get to see mummies that were
folded up and buried exactly as they were in Georgia. The archaeologist
rappelled down cliffs to peak into tombs that have not been seen in
hundreds of years. This produced some extremely dramatic scenes in the
documentary.
The only difference between tombs in Peru and Georgia was
that the acid soil, numerous fungi and high humidity of North Georgia
quickly ate away the mummified flesh of cadavers.
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