Onward, to a glorious Third Post

Welcome back.  I hope your weekend was as restful as mine.  If it wasn't, well that's quite a shame, as I feel quite refreshed.  But enough idle small talk, I know you all just want to hear my opinion on those effigy mounds, and I won't delay you any longer.

The effigy mounds are some of the most peculiar, and coolest, things in the United States.  From the earliest time Europeans arrived, the mounds had already been built, and the builders dead, but the questions surrounding them lives on, like, who built them? what was their purpose?  etc....  I, personally, really do like these mounds, and I think that these mounds distinguish themselves from the Lascaux caves quite easily.  Whereas the Lascaux cave paintings were in a dark, dingy, isolated room, and the paintings themselves quite ambiguous, the effigy mounds are built around the best hunting spots.   While many people believe that the effigy mounds have multiple uses, for burials, dances, and multitudes of other ceremonies, no one really knows what exactly went on in that room in Lascaux, and so were left clingly eagerly to the belief that there is religion in the paintings when clearly, we just have no idea as to what's going on in Lacaux.

I do think that the effigy mounds differ greatly from our usage of animals as sports teams names (though I was always the Melonheads in Backyard Baseball).  When we name a sports team something, we are naming it because either A) the animal has strong competitive qualities, like the Chicago Bears or Philadelphia Eagles, or B) because the animal is indigenous to the area, i.e. the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.  But the effigy mounds don't fit into that.  The effigy mounds are used to celebrate the earth, with the animals not actually meaning animals, but different parts of the earth:  birds mean air, land creatures mean earth, and wavy lines and such mean water.  The effigy mounds aren't even clear animals, so we couldn't tell whether they were building it for any specific kind of animal, or if the person who died has qualities of the animal.

Yet, there are religious connotations that you just can't deny.  Sure, we don't know for sure what the true meaning behind the effigies are, but between their symbolism, and the fact that many people gathered at these mounds, they fit within our definition of a religion as a cultural phenomenon.  And I think that we can assume a certain amount of spirituality in the people who made the mounds, because of no only what they symbolize, but because of the ceremonies, like burials, that went on at the mounds.

That about wraps up my third post; a glorious mix of mounds, caves, religion, and opinion.  I ask you, can it get any better?!