The Spikebuck Mound and the Origins of Quanassee

The Spikebuck Mound and the Origins of Quanassee. . , Long before Europeans visited Quanassee town, this valley was home to large communities of native farmers who produced crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, sunflowers, and tobacco in the rich riverbottoms along the Hiwassee. The Spikebuck mound and village once served as the ritual, civic and political center for one such community that spread for miles along the river near Hayesville. The mound, constructed more than 700 years ago as a platform for a temple/council house, marks the spread of the Mississippian cultural pattern into the heart of the southern mountains., This cultural complex, which saw the rise of settled villages and towns supported by large-scale maize agriculture, is a pattern shared by many different societies across much of the southeastern United States. The construction of platform mounds to define special ritual and political precincts within larger towns was a widespread Mississippian practice. Likewise, Mississippian societies shared broad themes and styles of sacred art, an indication of similar belief systems among diverse peoples of the Mississippian world. In many areas of the Southeast, the Mississippian pattern is linked to the rise of complex social and political systems, including hereditary chiefdoms., The Spikebuck mound and village was one of a number of ritual/political centers in the upper Hiwassee River basin. Nearby centers with platform temple mounds were located at Hiwassee (Peachtree, NC), Nottely (Culberson, NC), and probably at Konahete (Andrews, NC). These mound centers probably represent distinct, politically independent towns, similar to autonomous Cherokee towns of the historic era. These southern Appalachian Mississippian mound towns were likely the direct (ancestral) antecedents of the Cherokee Valley Towns that Europeans encountered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and early written accounts of Cherokee villages probably depict lifeways very similar to those of earlier Mississippian societies in the mountains., (Captions) , Hypothetical reconstruction of the Misssissippian period settlement at Spikebuck Mound, situated in the Hiwasee River Valley, with the Tusquittee Mountains to the west. , Artist's view of a Mississipian town and mound center. Many of these towns were surrounded by wooden stockades for military protection or to mark special social, political, or ritual spaces. Painting by Andy Buttram, Collection of the Illinois State Museum, Detail of the 1721 Barnwell map showing native settlements in the southern mountains. Many large historic era Cherokee towns, including Quanassee, Hiwassee, Knoahete, Nikwasi, Cowee, Estatoe, Nacoochee, and Great Tellico were mound centers during the earlier Mississppian period.