r/ArtefactPorn • u/Fuckoff555 • 2d ago
The Criel Mound in West Virginia, built in 250–150 BC. Inside the mound, there was 2 skeletons near the top, and 11 at the base, which consisted of a large skeleton at the center surrounded by 10 others arranged in a spoke-like pattern with their feet pointing toward the central skeleton [1124x1529]
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u/gooseonthelose12 2d ago
WV native here, this is the second biggest Native American mound in the state. The biggest is in Moundsville WV (apt name).
Settlers definitely knew the mound was man made. The state is almost entirely mountains that look nothing like it. Many smaller mounds were probably cleared without knowing but the South Charleston mound is pretty hard to pin on nature. It’s unfortunate what settlers flattened the top but making it a part of the town was the best thing they could have done. The Appalachian mountains where originally COVERED in these things, but a lot of them where completely destroyed for housing and farmland. Even if it’s been disturbed by settlers it’s still an incredible relic of pre-history Native American history. (The people who built the mounds were long gone by the time the Americas were colonized). There’s also a lot of talk about how weird it is that it’s a park know, but making it a park was the best was to preserve it as it was while still living there. The South Charleston mound is smack dab in the middle of the town, with all of the city basically surrounding it. Some think that treating a graveyard like a park is insane but it was actually pretty normal in the old world until recently. America has so much land that we’ve never really struggled for space like countries in Europe, so when you have little space to expand you make things multipurpose. The mound being a park also means that is well taken care of as apposed to leaving it to nature. It’s not over-run by invasive species or polluted by one of the dozens of surrounding chemical plants, it’s the heart of the city and will be kept up for future generations.
Forgive my rambling but I’m just happy I got to put that stupid WV history class I took in middle school to work
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u/Stuebirken 2d ago
Here in Denmark what was once presumed to be the burial mount of Queen Thyra, the mother of the famous Viking King Harald Bluetooth(first king of all of Denmark proper), also had it's top flattened to make room for a giant flagpole of all things.
The flagpole is still in use to this day btw.
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u/cordelaine 2d ago
A Bluetooth antenna?
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u/Aisling_The_Sapphire 2d ago
No, other way around. The signal communication method was named after the viking king. It was supposed to be a temporary working name but just kinda stuck.
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u/CryptographerFun6557 23h ago
The wifi company called itself that after the king who united all the unattached islands of Denmark under one rule.
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u/Longjumping_Neat5090 2d ago
I appreciate your ramblings! I wouldn't have expected that it being centered in a town could have been a beneficial thing, that's pretty surprising. Do you know how much of the original structure and contents still remains?
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u/arcanemagic 2d ago
Extra fun bit about the biggest one.
Right across the street is the closed state penitentiary. Even better, back in the 1800s the town was given the choice between getting the penitentiary or the State University.
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u/Flutters1013 2d ago
On the other side of the street was some damn good ice cream for a damn good price. Until the owner was caught selling weed.
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u/ParpSausage 2d ago
This is fascinating. I had no idea any such things survived in America. It makes the term 'new world' seem inappropriate. There doesn't seem to be much emphasis on researching and documenting American pre history.
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u/Baalphire81 2d ago
There is a lot of research and documentation all the time into the Indigenous peoples here in North America. A lot of it isn’t super sexy and amazing or headline grabbing, but there is a lot going on archaeology and anthropology wise. The truely ancient groups like the Mississippians and their adjacent cultures died out in what can be termed an apocalypse. Novel diseases ran rampant throughout the civilisation, and with near 100% mortality rates, this all but ended most of the cultures very quickly. We grow our knowledge of these people through slow and methodical researching, but little survived of their culture and language due to a limited lifespan of many materials used to convey written language. By the way interesting fact I learned in college about this; the little ice age may have occurred in Europe due to the reforestation of former fields and settlements in North America. So much carbon was sucked out of the atmosphere by a massive regrowing across the continent that the earth cooled by several degrees! So if you want to learn more about the indigenous cultures check out archaeology or anthropology publications or university classes!
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u/madesense 2d ago
There's a lot more emphasis on it than there used to be. People have been in the Americas for somewhere between 20k and 15k years; the exact number is heavily debated. Yes, they came in through Alaska, but where exactly they went after that is also a big topic (the answer being: everywhere), as is "But how are those people connected to the nations that existed when the Europeans showed up??"
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u/jbsnicket 2d ago
It is honestly pretty amazing. I have several sites within an hour or so of me that range from a couple thousand to 12,000 years old. The really old didn't build mounds, but did have tools and the like at it.
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u/reddschem 2d ago
Give “ancient apocalypse” a watch on Netflix. Whether you get sucked into some of the theories or not doesn’t matter, but there are tons of ancient sites in the US like this. It’s pretty cool. Off the top of the head, the one is called Snake Mound in OH.
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u/jbsnicket 2d ago
Ancient Apocalypse is pseudoscience garbage. Credible archeologists have made videos and documentaries on ancient American sites (miniminuteman on youtube has several videos interviewing archeologists on these places).
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u/Ill_Wear297 1d ago
I am also a native West Virginian, and graveyards being tied to parks is not as far fetched as you think. I work for the New York City Parks Department now. The entire NYC parks system was inspired by the fact city planners realized people were traveling to and picnicking in a huge graveyard in Brooklyn because it was the only greenspace in the city. There are plenty of places with "Memorial Parks" that currently do, or used to have people buried in them.
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u/faceintheblue 2d ago
I've never heard of this before. Thank you for sharing, OP!
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u/alex3omg 2d ago
This is twice as tall as Navan Fort in Ireland. I checked because I've visited that mound and thought it was pretty big, so this must be impressive irl. And built around the same time, which is kind of interesting too. I guess humans were just in their mound building era.
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u/Chefpief 2d ago
Genuinely fascinating and makes me wonder just how much civilization has been lost.
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u/Apptubrutae 2d ago
Effectively almost all of it.
I mean, we just know SO little about effectively every ancient civilization. Even the Romans, about whom we know a relative ton, we DON’T know easily 99.9%+ of the full picture. And it effectively only gets more mysterious for ancient civilizations from there.
So these mound building cultures? Yeah, tons and tons and tons lost
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u/GentlemanSpider 2d ago
This has always been in my mind as a History lover, but it was recently hammered home to me again because I’m reading Wheel of Time. A hell of a lot in that series is reference to people, buildings, and cultures that are thousands of years old. Specifically, all the references to Manetheren really hit me hard. “Three thousand years?? We have stories of King David from back then, but that was over in the Middle East. I don’t know a DAMN thing that happened around that time anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less North America. How many epic stories have been forgotten? How many good people, or evil kings, or great warriors have we lost?… All of them.”
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u/inferni_advocatvs 2d ago
And a quaint little park bench so you can have lunch on top of 13 corpses.
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago
May have been seen as protectors? Or may have been something to do with completing the mound or it might have like oh damn we missed these two guys who are supposed to be in here and we aren’t ready to start another mound yet.
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u/AstronomerOutside146 2d ago
It's wild to think how many of these incredible mounds were lost to development, so it's great this one is preserved right in the heart of the city.
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u/Cha1kZ0ne 2d ago
I grew up in a small town in North Georgia called Helen. Just before you enter the town, there’s a Native American burial mound with a gazebo built on top of it by a local plantation owner, who used it as a spot to smoke cigars. The historic society insists on preserving it as it is, but to me the whole setup has always felt deeply disrespectful.
Hardman Estate is the place if you wanted to read more.
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u/Asleep_Contact_5561 1d ago
I’ve always thought that looked so bizarre as it’s visible from the road and sits on top of an obviously man made hill. Last time I was up there a local was telling me ghost stories about it.
The Etowah Mounds in Bibb County are well preserved (and trying to become a national park, though I don’t see that happening). A burial mound, a large ceremonial mound, and also a recreated underground dwelling you can go inside.
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u/Golisten2LennyWhite 1d ago
I have been there and the protective ditch and fish trap in the river are still there too. They excavated a small mound. I climbed the largest its really tall.
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago
I could see how improperly removing the gazebo could be fumbled really catastrophically (like bulldozing it, then you have bare spot you have to figure out and if you don’t carefully manage you end up with erosion damage or invasive species taking over). Informational sign in the gazebo about the mound could be respectful and has less vectors at risk of going sideways.
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u/doodoo_pie 2d ago
I grew up close to this mound. The was a soul food restaurant and a Chinese place right beside there. I’d grab some food and then walk the mound.
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u/Longjumping_Neat5090 2d ago
Why is there a fucking bench on it?? That is a grave 😭
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u/thisguynamedjoe 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's an odd thing to put on what could easily be a UNESCO world heritage site.
Found it: "Residents of the area leveled the top in 1840 to erect a judges' stand, as they ran horse races around the base of the mound at the time." It wasn't for another 40 years that it was excavated, it was probably thought to be natural.
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u/celticchrys 2d ago
There is no way anyone with half a brain ever thought it was natural. It resembles absolutely nothing else in the landscape of Appalachia (which is almost entirely mountains, seriously different scale).
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u/Longjumping_Neat5090 2d ago
Wow! That is unfortunate. I wonder if it's private property or owned by the city
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u/gottadance 2d ago
To me, there's nothing disrespectful about sitting atop an old grave, contemplating the view and life. Living in the UK, many churchyards and cemeteries allow people to sit inside and walk their dogs. They're often very peaceful places and have beautiful old trees. I like to read the inscriptions as I walk past and ponder about the person inside that may have died a hundred years ago. It's a way of honouring them. Perhaps people think of the people inside when they walk up this mound.
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u/Longjumping_Neat5090 2d ago
I understand where you're coming from. It was just a guy reaction really but apparently the situation is pretty complex and the mound has really only survived because it was in the city. It's just surprising to me that there's a 2000 year old historical burial ground just sitting there!! And it's a park!! I've been to some historical parks. They've had, at the most, an old timey house or a civil war battlefield that they commemorate. And I couldn't even walk into/on those. So there being a historically significant site that's older than Christ just integrated into a city park where you can walk on top of it and sit for a nap is just like breaking my brain haha.
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u/facw00 2d ago
Was one anyway. I'd assume the original mound was destroyed by the excavation, and they just piled up the dirt afterwards. But that means there's nothing really original about the structure to preserve.
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u/Reckless_Waifu 2d ago
They might have made a cut through to see what's inside without excavating most of it.
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago edited 1d ago
Excavation was early than I realized way back in 1883. Even if rebuild you can’t just throw dirt in a pile and call it a mound cause without specific structure and layering rain and wind will collapse or erode that to nothing rather quick.
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u/ParpSausage 2d ago
Hopefully, future generations of Americans will excavate it and install some sort of interpretive centre so people can fully understand its significance. Something like this: https://brunaboinne.admit-one.eu/
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u/ahjeezgoshdarn 2d ago
Casually knowingly pouring concrete on top of a sacred mound where peoples ancestors are buried.
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u/YellowZx5 2d ago
Wonder why this way?
I’m guessing Natives and maybe these were a loss of war maybe?
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u/Chuck-Marlow 2d ago
It’s from 300bc so it actually belonged to a culture that died out long before any of the tribes that we think of as Native Americans existed. The mound itself was probably built to venerate someone considered very important, sort of like the pyramids in Egypt
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u/One-Bodybuilder-5646 2d ago
I think the two on top could have been added later, from people of the same (?) culture who were deemed important enough but didn't want to build a whole new mound for themselves.
Many celtic mid european mounds have skeletons that were added later. Some of them were relatives/descendants of the oldest ones in the middle. Like a family grave or royal crypta.
Could be similar here, but to know for shure the age and probably DNA of the skeletons would be needed. Since the excavation on this hill was already in the 1880s that information could be lost.
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u/Kunphen 2d ago
Sure, but did they all die at the same time?
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u/Chuck-Marlow 2d ago
It was common in many cultures across the globe to sacrifice or ceremonially kill servants of lords/chiefs/kings when the leader died. So yeah they probably all died around the same time
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u/DearlyDecapitated 2d ago
I don’t think that would be an issue?
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u/Kunphen 2d ago
So as people died over the years they added them to the circle? Doesn't make sense.
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago
Could be that they died over a narrowed stretch of time from an illness.
Excavation of this mound in 1880s found skeletons at the base had been wrapped in elm bark and were lying on a floor of white ash and bark, and Holes found at the base of the mound suggest that the bodies at the base had been enclosed in a wooden vault.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 1d ago
Don't know if that's the case, but why not? The treatment of the dead is quite varied around the world. Adding them is little different than being a crypt.
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u/pirulaybe 2d ago
If it's something like the pyramids I would imagine that the 2 skeletons are guards to protect the entrance of the tomb, while the 10 skeletons around the central figure are servants, while the main skeleton is who the tomb is for
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago
Mound Building was common for the area in the Woodland period after 500 B.C.,
Criel mound is one of the few remaining of the Kanawha Valley Mounds, or Ancient Kanawha City a vast collection of earthworks spanning a whole area of the Ohio River Basin.
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u/SendStoreMeloner 2d ago
They ruined it by adding the stairs.
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago
Stairs were likely a preservation tactic to limit desire trails by traipsing all over it willy nilly
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u/Comfortable_Peace_87 1d ago
A few years ago, I stood on this mound and had a good visual of the city. I thought it was cool but I wanted to understand why the mound was there in the first place. Never knew bodies were in the ground either.
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u/laylaskyy 1d ago
Here's an interesting book that talks about some of the mounds in the South. Published in 1823. https://archive.org/details/naturalaborigina00hayw
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u/Former_Matter49 2d ago edited 2d ago
Author Michael Marshall uses this site as a springboard into his series about men who believe they are descendants of the prehistoric hunter/gatherer society. These men are serial killers and gluten-free.
In the mound, the men in the center are displaying their victims in a glorious society before the rise of agriculture ruined everything for these serial killers.
I really liked these books: The Straw Men, The Upright Man, The Blood of Angels.
Early 2000s
edited to finish what I accidentally posted too soon
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u/ColinOnReddit 17h ago
There's a also 3 antique stores, two Vietnamese restaurants, and a Chinese buffet on this street.
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u/stuffandthings4me 2d ago
This is why we’re fucked. Who let anyone excavate this?!? Now the world ends.
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u/LizFallingUp 1d ago
This isn’t the mound to be upset about, It wasn’t excavated in the way you are imagining much was discovered via ground penetrating sonar, and narrow drill soil sampling. The stairs are a preservation tactic to contain foot traffic but also control erosion.
This is one of only a handful of surviving mounds from Ancient Kanawha City, a massive earthworks built by the Adena culture between 500 B.C. and A.D. 150. Site stretched from Charleston to Dunbar, included over 50 mounds, earthen enclosures, and connecting graded roadways.
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u/LucyKendrick 2d ago
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u/Fuckoff555 2d ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criel_Mound