Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa

Back on the western side of Old Man River, now in Iowa, we visited the Effigy Mounds National Monument, just north of Marquette.

The term "effigy mounds" refers to animals and other shapes formed between 750 and 1,400 years ago by American Indians who piled earth into large, deliberately shaped mounds. In the upper Midwest of the USA there was a culture that regularly built mounds in the shapes of birds, turtles, lizards, bison and, most commonly, bears.

The effigy mounds at this site in Iowa are some of the last remaining examples of more than 10,000 mounds that were documented in the 19th and early 20th century. The land has been logged and converted into farmland, destroying all trace of the mounds that were so painstakingly manually constructed. A typical effigy is two to four feet high, 40 feet wide, and 80 feet long. Imagine carrying that much dirt by hand.

Effigy mounds, those shaped like animals, are perhaps the most interesting, but they were not the first mounds constructed. Dome-shaped, conical burial mounds started to be built by the Woodland Indians about 3,000 years ago. About 1,400 years later the Woodland Indians began to build effigy mounds. Although the reasons for the mounds is not clear, the shapes chosen and evidence of ceremonial fire at the "head," "heart," or "flank" of the mounds, suggest a spiritual motivation. Around 750 years ago the Indians stopped building effigy mounds as mysteriously as they began. The memory of their purpose and the reasons they were abandoned have been lost.



The Rangers at this National Monument offer a guided, hour and half long, walking tour around a number of the mounds. We opted out of the tour after the 20 minute introduction. It wasn't that the subject matter was uninteresting. It's just that the young Ranger leading our group had a peculiar disability. He was, possibly congenitally, incapable of speaking in public.

Although able to make occasional, fleeting eye contact, he was chronically dependent on "comfort" words and phrases that he used to fill pauses, regardless of whether or not the words made sense. The most common comfort phrase was "too, as well." So he might say "Most of the remains were buried right in the centre of the mounds too, as well." He might follow this by explaining that human remains buried in the mounds were a very small percentage of the whole human too, as well whose corpse would have been left out to be picked over by animals too, as well, or might have had the flesh stripped manually from the bone too, as well, before burial too, as well.

Twenty minutes of that was far too, as well, much for me. How could anyone make such gory and interesting stories so excruciating to listen to?

Jumping off the good ship too, as well, we had a look around the museum instead.

One cool exhibit was this life size model of an eagle's nest. Life size means big. I could have comfortably climbed up there and curled up for a nap inside.

I decided not to, however, once I'd taken a look inside. It might be only a model, but I wouldn't want to argue about it with an angry and disoriented eagle.