Archaeologists Return to Oklahoma’s Spiro Mounds

OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLAHOMA—Researchers will return to Spiro Mounds to investigate a prehistoric building identified with remote sensing technology last fall. The building and other formations are part of a settlement that was inhabited between 800 and 1450 A.D. and is now in danger of eroding from a creek bank. “Almost all of what we know about Spiro comes from excavation of the Craig Mound in the 1930s—both by looters and by professional archaeologists. And we know next to nothing about what’s happening in other parts of the site and around it, and so we’re just sort of shifting focus away from mounds into the rest,” Scott Hammerstedt of the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey told The Tribune.