Effigy Mounds

The overwhelming impression we get when confronted with effigy mounds is one of impressive size. The amount of dirt and space taken up with these mounds is immense and invokes a sense of awe in the viewer, in part because of the vast effort that must have been involved in making such monuments. These effigy mounds must have taken a fantastic amount of organization and concerted effort on the part of the entire community responsible for them. Something like the paintings at Lascaux, on the other hand, could have been executed by a single person or small group of people. Although the effort of selecting the cave, planning the paintings, and reaching up to the ceilings and higher parts of the walls is significant, the mounds required an effort orders of magnitude larger and more communal. I am therefore inclined to think that the importance of the animals represented in effigy mounds are of greater importance to the community than those in the cave paintings.

Something of such magnitude must be of great importance to the community for whatever reason, whether it be religious, social, or political. The effigy mounds, in particular, seem to have a more intangible purpose than those used as platforms for ceremonies or living quarters. As was mentioned in class, the animal shapes are only really visible from an aerial point of view, suggesting perhaps a celestial (in the sense of "in the sky") audience. This point suggests that the mound builders did not see themselves as the only beings that mattered, perhaps hinting at a belief system involving superhuman or supernatural beings. We cannot know the true purpose of these mounds merely from their shapes, but it does not seem far-fetched to interpolate some abstract purpose satisfying a more impractical need than those of shelter and social hierarchy.

Contemporary use of animals in naming things like sports teams serves a purpose both similar and different. The name or mascot of a particular sports team is often chosen to intimidate opposing teams, which is why there are so many teams called the "cougars" or "panthers" or "eagles," all of which are powerful and somewhat frightening animals. Some team names are chosen to represent something about the city or place from which they originate, like the Pittsburgh Steelers. The first of these two reasons seems to be similar to the ideas expressed about the effigy mounds -- they are meant to evoke some particular emotion or idea in the perceiver-- while the latter is a different sort of purpose.