Evidence of a Subsurface Chamber Under the Brown Mound at Spiro

Extract

My notes on the Brown mound (Br. 3) of the Spiro site filed at the University of Oklahoma were misplaced and therefore not available to Kenneth Orr at the time he prepared his preliminary Spiro report. (American Antiquity, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1946.) The following data are from a personal copy of the original notes.

When I visited the Spiro site in August 1935, members of the Pocola Mining Company were “exploring“ the Brown mound. Using a team and slip, they had put one trench about 20 feet wide almost completely through the mound from the north side and a side trench from the west to the center of the mound. The clay subsoil was exposed in both trenches, less than a foot of it having been removed from the north-south trench. These trenches, with the spreading of the fill around the north, south, and west sides of the mound, had all but obliterated its original shape and size.