After it spent a few centuries buried in east Oklahoma soil, it's remarkable the Spiro lace exists at all, said Dowd, the museum's registrar. But after a look at the strands of fabric, it's obvious that the artisan who made the lace took pride in the work, she said.
“When you see this piece, it was clearly made by somebody who really knew what they were doing,” she said.Collected from the Spiro Mounds site in Le Flore County, the lace is one of the largest, best-preserved samples archaeologists have found of late prehistoric woven textiles.
The lace is one of the entries listed in the Oklahoma Cultural Heritage Trust's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts. It gives archaeologists a rare glimpse into the kinds of garments people in the late prehistoric period might have worn every day, Dowd said.Located about 15 miles west of Fort Smith, Ark., Spiro Mounds are a collection of earth mounds that were probably built by ancestors of the modern-day Caddo and Wichita tribes, Dowd said. That group lived in the area from about 800-1400 A.D., she said.
Gary McAdams, cultural program planner with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, said the site includes burial mounds that probably included graves of tribal leaders. The number of artifacts archaeologists found with the human remains led them to believe the people buried there had been important to the tribe, he said.
The site also includes platform mounds with structures on them, McAdams said. Those mounds probably served some ceremonial purpose, he said, but it's difficult to say exactly what that purpose would have been.OU archaeologists found the Spiro lace during an excavation in the 1930s. After looters dug up the site looking for gemstone beads, OU archaeology professor Forrest Clements led an effort to try to salvage what was left.
The artifacts Clements and his team found at the site numbered into the tens of thousands and came from all over North America, Dowd said. Archaeologists found plates from the Great Lakes and Appalachian Mountains, shell cups from the Gulf Coast and shell beads from as far away as California, she said.Because of the number of exotic artifacts, archaeologists originally thought the mound was built to honor a powerful chief, Dowd said. More recently, she said, the more common theory is that the mounds served as a pilgrimage site. Visitors likely came to the site from all over North America in the same way that European pilgrims flocked to pilgrimage sites there during the Middle Ages, she said.
Archaeologists found the Spiro lace in the central chamber of Craig Mound, a burial mound at the site. Woven garments would have been fairly common at the time the lace was made, Dowd said. But unlike other artifacts like clay pots and stone tools, woven goods like baskets and fabric generally don't survive centuries under ground.
The lace probably survived because of relatively dry conditions inside the mound and because it was buried alongside copper plates, Dowd said. The metallic properties of the copper probably helped protect the fabric, she said.Many of the artifacts found at the site are on display at the Sam Noble Museum or at the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center. The lace is housed at the museum at OU, and isn't on public display.
Although the lace answers questions about the techniques late prehistoric artisans would have used to create fabric, scientists still don't know everything about it, Dowd said. There's no way to tell whether the lace came from a blanket or a piece of clothing, she said.It's also difficult to say for sure whether the lace was made nearby or if it, like many of the other artifacts found in the mounds, was brought from far away.“We make educated guesses,” she said. “We try to make the best theories we can based on the evidence, but there's always some uncertainty.”
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