Tiny Effigies
Fort Walton Mound, FL
I only just learned this mound was here, taking
up
less than half a block of busy street lined
with tourist shops and crosswalks, hidden deep
in the shade of live oaks and cabbage palm.
Not at all like the immense earthworks I’ve
learned of
in art history classes: ten stories tall,
situated over
thousands of acres, platformed and terraced,
or else molded into shapes of great beasts and
men,
whose full aspects are visible only to the
gods.
This one is a comparatively humble twelve feet,
flat-topped, reduced by time, long abandoned
even
when Confederate soldiers made their camp on
its apex,
the better to watch for enemy ships.
It was they who dug the bones, recognized
fellow soldiers by their shattered ribcages, the
holes
in their skulls; ancient nut and oyster shells
sucked clean by ravenous mouths. Surely they
noticed
how little changes in the life-and-death
instruments
as they shucked their own meager dinners with a
Bowie knife.
Once, a chief or high priest would’ve lived
on top of this mound. What must it have been,
to make your home upon the death knoll? Was it
he
who carved the tiny effigies found at the site,
sculpted in the same clay that holds the
bodies?
The museum plaques tell so little, though
the artifacts themselves chatter loud their
individuality:
distinct head shapes, smiles, beards, pierced
ears,
topknots, even masks. Yet how this place teems
with tiny life:
mockingbirds and squirrels, scrub lizards,
all building nests, the carpenter ants erecting
their own hills in the green light, where the
red buckeye
weeps hard tears.
The Fort Walton Mound was built about 850 by the Pensacola culture which was centered at Bottle Creek, north of Mobile bay to the west. The mound builders there used mostly sand, grit, grog, or combinations of these materials as tempering agents in their pottery, whereas other Pensacola peoples used shell tempering. The mound, which is still 12 ft (3.7 m) high and 223 ft (68 m) wide at the base, served as the ceremonial and political center of the chiefdom and probably the chief's residence. It was also the burial ground of the elites in the society. Several wattle-and-daub buildings once stood on top of the mound, perhaps at different times. By 1500 the mound was abandoned and lay dormant until the area was reinhabited by white settlers in the mid 19th century. During the American Civil War, Confederate soldiers established Camp Walton in 1861 to guard Santa Rosa sound and Choctawhatchee bay; these troops were the 1st excavators of the mound. John Love McKinnon, an officer with the Walton Guards, wrote a "History of Walton County" in which he speculated that the area they dug into was once a charnel house and noted that several human remains were those of large individuals who were probably warriors as indicated by damage to their skulls, thighs, and arms consistent with hacking and blunt force trauma.
ReplyDeleteGreat poem! Very interesting pictures too!
ReplyDelete