Although I mentioned something in my last post about the shapes of the effigy mounds being visible from above, the shapes are really only coherent in the minds and ideas of the community that built them. This leads to an interpretation of a more spiritual, inner monologue-type of interaction with the spirits and animals represented in the mounds. The builders had some image of the animal they wanted to represent, but it was not necessary to make this image inescapably clear to casual viewers or even other people looking for shapes in the mounds. The indistinctness of the shapes is a clue towards how the builders of the mounds felt and thought about the spirits represented-- the actual building may have been a symbolic gesture, a reminder of some thought processes and beliefs that were already in place or beginning to form in the minds of the builders. It points to a religion that tended towards the spiritual, personal end of the spectrum.

The builders of giant temple mounds like the Mississippians, however, seem to have something else on their minds. Unlike the low, indistinct effigy mounds, the temple mounds of places like Cahokia are hugely tall and sharply shaped into ziggurats and pyramids. The effort involved in making these structures is necessarily larger than that involved in making effigy mounds, and they seem to serve a more ceremonial purpose-- that is, ceremonies seem to have been conducted atop them. This, as opposed to the imagination and spirituality of effigy mounds, leads one to lean toward a very community-based, group-oriented religion. On the scale from spiritual to cultural that we discussed in class, the effigy mound builders seem to be on the spiritual end, while the temple mound builders seem to occupy the opposite end of the line.

Despite this seemingly/possibly large difference in use or purpose of mounds, we tend to group them all together, which is part of what led me to assume that effigy mounds and such were on the same general size as those of the Mississippians. There is probably a multitude of reasons leading to this sort of clumping together, but a big reason likely has to do with our separation from all of the mound building cultures in time and sometimes space-- the farther away something is or seems, the more similar to other things we perceive it to be. I guess you could call it a sort of cultural short-sightedness, but without the egocentric implications.