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<< Other Photo Pages >> Elizabeth Mound Complex - Barrow Cemetery in United States in Great Lakes Midwest

Submitted by bat400 on Monday, 24 August 2015  Page Views: 5551

Neolithic and Bronze AgeSite Name: Elizabeth Mound Complex Alternative Name: Elizabeth Mounds, Elizabeth Site
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 30.733 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: Great Lakes Midwest Type: Barrow Cemetery
Nearest Town: Qunicy, IL  Nearest Village: Valley City, IL
Latitude: 39.706000N  Longitude: 90.653W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
2
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Elizabeth Mound Complex
Elizabeth Mound Complex submitted by bat400_photo : "Bobcat skull Pengo". Originally used to illustrate "Elizabeth Mounds" site listing.
Photo: Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bobcat_skull_Pengo.jpg#/media/File:Bobcat_skull_Pengo.jpg (Vote or comment on this photo)
Barrow Cemetery in Pike County, Illinois. A Havana Hopewell Culture funeral mound complex on a bluff overlooking the Illinois River. Most of the burials were dated to the Middle Woodland era (ca. 1 BCE) but the area was also used as an earlier Archaic era burial site (ca. 2000 BCE.)

This group of small conical burial mounds was excavated in the 1970 - 80's when the site was slated to be overbuilt by highway bridge constructions. [Author note: I have not determined if there is any trace of the site remaining. The location given is general to the nearby modern village and is not representative of any feature of this site.]
This site was determined to be associated with a camp or periodic settlement (Napolean Hollow) on the floodplain and lower slopes of the Illinois River.

The earlier Archaic burials consisted of both intact burials (some with evidence of the remains having been buried or re-buried after rituals that took place after partial decomposition) and bundle burials. Scattered bones and bone framents indicated that the area had been a cemetary site for generations.

Later Hopewell culture mounds (14 mounds, some as large as 8 feet high and 90 feet in diameter) contained multiple burials. Some burials were in central tombs, surrounded by additional burials, with grave goods and animal burials.

References:

Claassen, Cheryl, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America: An Interpretive Guide, University of Alabama Press, Jun 15, 2015.

Perri, A.; Martin, T.; Farnsworth, K,; "A Bobcat Burial and Other Reported Intentional Animal Burials from Illinois Hopewell Mounds", Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Volume 40, Issue 3 (Fall, 2015).

Note: Ancient bobcat skeleton found buried with humans. The Megalithic Portal provides more information on this news story, see the comment on our page
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Nearby Images from Flickr
NS 255 approaching Valley City Bridge
St. Joseph Trip
Looming Threat
'Cross the Illinois
#255 at Valley City - Pt. 2
#255 at Valley City

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 18.2km SSE 160° Montezuma Mound Group* Artificial Mound
 68.3km WNW 290° Indian Mounds Park* Artificial Mound
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 83.4km NE 37° Rockwell* Artificial Mound
 85.0km NNE 32° Dickson Mounds* Barrow Cemetery
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"Elizabeth Mound Complex" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Ancient bobcat buried like a human being by bat400 on Wednesday, 19 August 2015
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About 2000 years ago in what is today western Illinois, a group of Native Americans buried something unusual in a sacred place. In the outer edge of a funeral mound typically reserved for humans, villagers interred a bobcat, just a few months old and wearing a necklace of bear teeth and marine shells. The discovery represents the only known ceremonial burial of an animal in such mounds and the only individual burial of a wild cat in the entire archaeological record, researchers claim in a new study. The villagers may have begun to tame the animal, the authors say, potentially shedding light on how dogs, cats, and other animals were domesticated.

“It’s surprising and marvelous and extremely special,” says Melinda Zeder, a zooarchaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. But Zeder, who was not involved in the study, says it’s unclear whether these people treated the bobcat as a pet or invested the animal with a larger spiritual significance.

The mound is one of 14 dirt domes of various sizes that sit on a bluff overlooking the Illinois River, about 80 kilometers north of St. Louis. Their builders belonged to the Hopewell culture, traders and hunter-gatherers who lived in scattered villages of just a couple of dozen individuals each and created animal-inspired artwork, like otter-shaped bowls and ceramics engraved with birds. “Villages would come together to bury people in these mounds,” says Kenneth Farnsworth, a Hopewell expert at the Illinois State Archaeological Survey in Champaign.

Archaeologists rushed to excavate the mounds in the early 1980s because of an impending highway project. When they dug into the largest one—28 meters in diameter and 2.5 meters high—they unearthed the bodies of 22 people buried in a ring around a central tomb that contained the skeleton of an infant. They also discovered a small animal interred by itself in this ring; marine shells and bear teeth pendants carved from bone lay near its neck, all containing drill holes, suggesting they had been part of a collar or necklace. The Hopewell buried their dogs—though in their villages, not in these mounds—and the researchers assumed the animal was a canine. They placed the remains in a box, labeled it “puppy burial,” and shelved it away in the archives of the Illinois State Museum in Springfield.

Decades later, Angela Perri, a Ph.D. student at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, came across the box in 2011 while doing research in ancient dog burials at the museum. “As soon as I saw the skull, I knew it was definitely not a puppy,” says Perri, now a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It was a cat of some kind.”

When Perri analyzed the bones, she found that they belonged to a bobcat, likely between 4 and 7 months old. The skeleton was complete, and there were no cut marks or other signs of trauma, suggesting to Perri that the animal had not been sacrificed. When she looked back at the original excavation photos, she saw that the bobcat had been carefully placed in its grave. “It looked respectful; its paws were placed together,” she says. “It was clearly not just thrown into a hole.”

When Perri told Farnsworth, he was floored. “It shocked me to my toes,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it in almost 70 excavated mounds.” Because the mounds were intended for humans, he says. “Somebody important must have convinced other members of the society that it must be done. I’d give anything to know why.”

Perri, who reports the discovery with Farnsworth and another colleague this week in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, has her suspicions. The pomp and circumstance of the burial, she says, “suggests this animal had a very special place in the life of these people.” And the age of the kitten implies that the villagers brought it in from the wild and may have tried to raise i

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