The
religions of many indigenous cultures in the America’s have held carrion eaters
in high esteem. American buzzards and
vultures are not related to the birds of that name in the Old World, but are
all cousins of the California Condor.
Color slides of the Rock Eagle Mound and
various species of vultures in the Americas may viewed at: http://www.examiner.com/slideshow/vultures-and-condors-of-the-americas
At
the time of first contact between English colonists and Southeastern Native
Americans only certain branches of the Shawnee People utilized the vulture as a
central theme of religious worship. The Xuale
People, a branch of the Shawnee
living in West Virginia and South Carolina, literally called themselves the
Buzzard People. Suale
or Sule, pronounced Shü
: wä : lē or Shü : lē, means “vulture”
in Shawnee, Cherokee and Creek. The Alabama,
Choctaw and Chickasaw use the words, sayki
or sheki.
Archaeological
evidence suggests that in earlier times, a mortuary cult symbolized by the
vulture, was practiced by many ethnic groups in the Southeast. Priests in this cult, known as Buzzard Men,
never cut their finger nails or hair.
They dressed in black feathered cloaks and used their fingernails to
scrape the smokehouse preserved flesh off of cadavers.
William
Bartram observed in 1776 that several Creek chiefs in Florida kept beautiful
Painted Vultures as pets. The most
esteemed cloaks worn by Creek leaders were made of the colorful feathers of the
Painted Vulture, not eagle feathers as commonly believed today.
The
Rock Eagle and Rock Hawk in Putnam County, GA
Overlooking the banks of a small lake in Middle
Georgia is an enigma. It is a conical mound of white quartz fieldstones with
tail feathers, wings and a head extending outward. The breast of the bird is
eight feet high. The wings have a spread of 120 feet. The distance from the tip of the tail to the
top of the head is 102 feet. For Google Map lovers, the shrine’s location is: Latitude:
33°25'03"N and Longitude: 83°23'17"W.
This famous archaeological site is located in
Putnam County, whose county seat is Eatonton.
Putnam has another claim to fame.
Author and journalist, Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908) grew up in
Eatonton. Harris originally wrote “The Uncle Remus Tales” as a series of
columns in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper.
In 1946, Walt Disney turned the antics of his Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and
Brer Bar (Bear) into the hugely successful movie, “Song of the South.” Despite what Harris said when introducing the
newspaper series, he did not grow up on a plantation. He also did not obtain the stories from an
elderly African-American slave, but rather gleaned them from the archives of
the Georgia Historic Society in Savannah, when he was Associate Editor of the
Savannah Morning News. They are Creek
Indian children stories.
The Rock Eagle also has a “hidden history.” Many
references and news media articles tell readers that this bird looks to the
east toward the sunrise and is at least 5,000 years old. No, it looks to the
southeast and the beak is pointed due south. Archaeological studies have steadily shrunken
the age of the Rock Eagle, but it long predates the arrival of British
colonists to the Southeastern Coast.
History has forgotten who first called it the
Rock Eagle. The branch of the Creek Indians, living in that area when the first
Anglo-American settlers arrived, stated that they didn’t build it, but held the
site sacred. However, it was probably built by the ancestors of another branch
of the Creeks, who lived in the region earlier.
During the 1600s and early 1700s the few survivors of European plagues
and English-sponsored slave raids frequently moved across the landscape of the
Lower Southeast.
Many printed sources also claim that the Rock
Eagle and Rock Hawk are the only Indian mounds in the shape of raptors. That is not true either. A much larger bird-shaped mound was built
around 1200 BC at Poverty Point, LA.
There are several smaller raptor mounds scattered around Eastern North
America. However, the two mounds in Middle Georgia are the only bird effigies
built of white quartz stones.
The first book to describe the Rock Eagle was
published by pioneer anthropologist, Charles C. Jones, Jr. in 1873. Jones measured the shrine. He interpreted the Rock Eagle as being of
American Indian origin.
During the 1930s, archaeologist Arthur Kelly
was paid by the WPA to excavate the Rock Eagle to its base. He found a single
human burial underneath it, plus a single quartz spear point. The burial may or may not be related to the
construction of the mound. Unfortunately, forensic anthropology was in a primitive
state during that era, so the ethnicity and age of the skeleton remains
unknown.
While Director of the University of Georgia’s
Anthropology Department in the 1950s, Kelly directed several more studies of
the Rock Eagle. Evidence of a circular
rock around the effigy was found.
Archaeologists found traces of brightly colored non-indigenous clay at
certain locations. Apparently, at least
some of the bird effigy had been stuccoed with clay. They also found the ashes of human remains on
and near the piled rocks. This suggests
that the Rock Eagle was a location for
cremations.
After the 1950s, Georgia archaeologists lost
interest in the Rock Eagle and Rock Hawk, thinking that there was nothing more
to be learned about the site and its unanswered questions could never be
answered. In the intervening years writers
of articles on the site have speculated that the Rock Eagle was a regional
shrine for worship, a mortuary complex for processing the remains of high
status persons, a message sent to the Creator up in the heavens or a navigational
landmark for extraterrestrial travelers.
Some scholars noted that neither effigy
looked like either an eagle or a hawk.
The Rock Eagle looks like a vulture, while the Rock Hawk looks like a
song bird, or perhaps a Carolina Parakeet. The implications of these
observations fell on deaf ears.
A
fresh look at Georgia’s stone architecture sites
The Apalache Foundation was incorporated in
mid-2014 to sponsor professional studies of the hundreds of pre-European stone
architecture sites in the Southern Highlands and Piedmont. All of the sites are located within the
boundaries of the Apalache Kingdom, which predated the Creek Confederacy and
Cherokee Alliance. The Appalachian
Mountains are named after this almost forgotten indigenous people.
The Rock Eagle and Rock Hawk effigies first
caught the attention of this new team of researchers because they are aligned
to a corridor, at around 83° 20-24’ longitude, of stone veneered mounds and
stone cairns. This line is slightly tilted because it is based on True North,
not Magnetic North. The corridor is punctuated
with a complex of stone shrines on Curahee Mountain in Stephens County, GA and
a very large terrace complex with stone mounds, cairns and rectangular building
ruins along Sandy Creek in Jackson County, GA.
Almost all Native American mounds and towns,
built in Georgia between 250 BC and 1600 AD were aligned to the solar
azimuth. The alignment of a structure
can tell much about its builders and use. Rock Eagle is tilted to the southwest at
approximately 16 degrees. The alignment
approximates the sunset on the Spring and Fall Equinoxes at that location. The
tip of its beak points toward True South.
That arrangement would create a triangulation, useful for astronomical
observations and surveying.
Most Native American structures in Georgia
either are aligned with the Winter Solstice Sunset, the beginning of the Maya
Calendar, or at an angle approximating either the sunrise or sunset on the
Summer Solstice. The Summer Solstice is
the beginning of the Muskogean Calendar, which was used after around 1375 AD by
ancestors of the modern day Creek, Seminole and Alabama Indians.
As can be seen in the images associated with
this article, the Rock Eagle is probably a vulture or condor. Buzzard is an
American colloquial name for a vulture. Buzzards
and vultures in the Western Hemisphere are unrelated to the birds with those
names in the Old World. It would be more
accurate to call all carrion-eating birds in the New Worlds, condors.
Buzzards, vultures and condors were
associated with the religions of several indigenous cultures in the Western
Hemisphere. It is interesting that those
religions all contained practices similar to the ancient Zoroastrian religion
of Persia and the upper Middle East.
Zoroastrianism was the first monotheistic religion and dates from about
600 BC. The cadavers of loved ones were placed on wooden platforms, where
carrion-eating birds would devour their flesh.
Once cleaned, the bones would be bundled and placed in jars, wooden
chests or baskets. The Lakota Indians
continued this practice until the late 1800s.
A death-obsessed religion appeared in the
State of Guerrero of southern Mexico over 2,000 years ago. Its primary symbol was am abstract vulture,
very similar in appearance to the Rock Eagle in Georgia. (See image above.) Note that the body of the Guerrero vulture, Tzopilotl, is an exaggerated circle like
the Rock Eagle in Middle Georgia.
Images of vultures can also be seen in the
ceramic and copper art of the Hopewell Culture in the Ohio Basin. It flourished from around 200 BC to 500 AD.
The people of this culture were obsessed with death. Many of their famous ceremonial sites were
built around mortuary temples.
What would vultures have in common with the
Equinox? American Turkey Vultures do migrate southward from the northern
regions of eastern North America in the autumn and return in late March. Until becoming extinct in the late 1700s the
Southeastern Painted Vulture probably migrated from the central Southeast to
the Florida Peninsula in the autumn. William Bartram was one of two
scientists-artists who painted the bird before it disappeared. The Painted Vulture was closely related to the
Mesoamerican King Vulture, but not quite the same in appearance. (See slides
associated with this article.)
The Painted Vulture was yet another victim of
removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. A some point in the
past, this magnificent bird became biologically dependent on eating cooked
meat. Many were domesticated and lived in mortuary temples. Some were kept as pets by Native
leaders. Those in the wild lived off the
animals killed when Native Americans burned off the underbrush of forests.
The annual burnings of the forest floors by
Native Americans encouraged grasses to grow. The grasses provided more nutrition for game
animals than mature shrubs. In northeast
Georgia, the Natives even created artificial prairies where large herds of
Woodland Bison roamed. Once European
settlers replaced the Natives, the annual burnings stopped. Almost immediately the Painted Vulture, the
Southeastern Woodland Bison and the Southeastern Elk became extinct.
There is an important feature of the Rock
Eagle that links the mound to the Painted Vulture. Both the Painted Vulture and
its still existent cousin, the King Vulture, have predominantly white
bodies. They are the only carrion eating
birds in the world that have this coloration. The wings and tail feathers of
these two vultures are intense shades of black and bronze. If the Rock Eagle
actually portrays a Painted Vulture, it would make perfect sense for its
builders to use white quartz for the body.
The Rock Eagle Archaeological site is owned
by the federal government and maintained by the University of Georgia. The Rock Eagle Mound is located on the 1500
acre tract of Rock Eagle 4H Camp, which is owned by the University of Georgia.
Admission is free.
The Rock Eagle 4H camp is located southeast
of Atlanta, GA near US Highway 441, between Eatonton and Madison, GA. The mound is fenced. However, visitors may climb the stairs of a
stone tower to get a complete view of the ancient shrine from above.
Eating carrion is a dirty job, but somebody
has got to do it! Support your local buzzards.
Richard Thornton, Architect & City
Planner
POOF Editor
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