Georgia's "Rock Eagle" Mound.

[MarathonTmatt]

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.


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


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



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



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 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. 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



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



by Richard Thornton

[MarathonTmatt]

Article written by Creek historian and 'People Of One Fire' editor Richard Thornton: ("new" findings):

http://www.examiner.com/article/apal...theast-georgia

[MarathonTmatt]

Another Richard Thornton article here:

http://www.examiner.com/article/lost...over-the-radar

"Lost American Civilizations Flew Right Over the Radar."

Introduces readers to lost stone ruin sites from Canada, New England, Virginia, Georgia, etc.

He was also featured on an episode of History Channel's "America Unearthed" but I could not find any links to the episode that features his research.