Could The "MiamiStone Circle"
Share An AffinityWith The Macon Earthlodge?

B. W. Powell © 1999

Abstract

The author examines some odd parallels between two different Southeastern US sites, citing limited hard data. He then offers some reasoned speculation, and suggests implementing dig protocols and literature searches in future that might enhance verification of similarities.

MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, as one of the excavating team of archeologists at 8/DA/12, or the "Great Miami Stone Circle" as it is sometimes popularly called, I was struck by a vague similarity (i.e., rings-of-basins) between the site we were then uncovering at Brickell Point in downtown Miami, and the great (restored) prehistoric Earthlodge at Ocmulgee Old Fields, near Macon, Georgia. True, there was perhaps only the grossest "sense" of correspondence here perhaps, since in many important particulars the sites differ markedly.

I mentioned this several times to the then-Dig Directors, and to one acclaimed off-site regional archeologist, but was, to put it bluntly, flatly ignored.

I was fairly familiar with Ocmulgee having trained as an infantry replacement at nearby Camp Wheeler in WWII, and also having visited the site in the years since.

Ocmulgee and its environs have yielded evidence of human occupation since Paleo times, and the "Old Fields" were a site of much activity in the Late Mississippian. Related to this phase is a very large Earthlodge discovered and excavated in the 1930's. I have mentioned this lodge elsewhere on my website, but will repeat here that it is a large semi-subterranean, circular chamber, showing most notably a raised "eagle" or thunderbird effigy platform at one (S) end, and a low, inclined, circling earthen bench around its interior perimeter, with defined seating places permitting ranked status seating, and witha row of ellipsoid "vomitoria" or basins in front of each.

There are forty-seven basins in all.

It is known the Late Mississippians and their descendants - the historic Creeks (Muskogeans) who inhabited wide areas of the South at the time of Contact, practiced the "Black Drink" (sometimes "Black Vomit") Ceremony. This involved ingestion of teas made from leaves of the Nux vomica or Ilex - a native shrub, also variously cited as Cassina (Yaupon Holly) and others of the holly family. N. vomica and its cogeners reportedly induce a copious emesis or vomiting. Perhaps there are secondary hallucinatory effects one surmises, which is probably why the Amerinds chose to ingest it. Celebrants vomited into the basins before them; this practice was actually seen and described by early European explorers (LeMoyne and others) to the region.

In September this year, a petrographic analysis issued by geologists at the University of Miami stated that parts of a broken axe found at 8/DA/12 - a so-called "Mayan axe" as they have so frequently been dubbed on-site and in the press - were actually a basalt from a source region "…very close to Macon, Georgia." This immediately aroused my attention again you can imagine, and I remembered my priority (I copyright/date stamp my own field notes and posts) in raising the issue earlier on-site about whether there might be an affinity between our local basins and those of the restored Earthlodge ruins 500-odd miles north of us in Georgia.

The etiology of the basins at 8/DA/12 has been the subject of ongoing dispute ever since they were first uncovered late in the summer of 1998. They have been tediously and some times tenditiously described and re-described elsewhere. Incredibly, there is even a contingent that holds the basins may not even be prehistoric archeological phenomena in the first place, suggesting (Milanich, J.T. Archaeology, Sept. 1999) that they may instead relate to practices of mid-twentieth century septic tank installers. The reader is invited to consider whether or no the practice of field archeology is insufficient at this late date to distinguish between the effects of installing an object the size of a modern septic tank less than sixty years ago, and the presumed evidences left by aboriginal basin makers.

Let us accept for now the Miami basins are a series of roughly ellipsoid, ovoid and some rectanguloid and irregular holes in the local Miami oolite (marine limestone), varying roughly from one to four feet in (overall) length (some have protuberences and "extensions"). (See B in illustration). In depth they are rather variable, up to two or more feet in some cases, but others shallower. As is often reported, depending on who's counting at the dig, we generally all "see" 26 such basins in our Circle. The fact of their rather (overall) precise circularity in layout is the single strongest observation in support of their being anthropogenic, in my opinion, at least. Much effort, including certainly mine, has also been expended to seek natural means for their origin.

And natural basins do indeed form in a variety of ways in shoreside marine limestones, but not typically in a quite precise circle or ring.

Our ring at Miami (B in the illustration) is approximately 38 feet in diameter (dashed line X/Y). The ring at the Macon Earthlodge, as I have determined as best I can (basin to basin, not wall to wall) from plats supplied by the officials there (S. Flowers, personal comm.) is approximately 39 feet in diameter (X/Y in A). A nearly remarkable coincidence, you say? Yes, but then all "coincidences" are remarkable by their being coincidences (or near-coincidences) in the first place. Let us consider this further.

The basins at Ocmulgee appear much more regular than those at 8/DA/12… The National Park Service plat suggests they run on the order of 10 to 12 inches wide and around 18 to 24 inches long. (I have elminated some confusing lines in my adaptation of this plat at A, and taken the further liberty of filling in the basins in black for improved visibility). I have no elevation data but vaguely recall from on-site visits they must be on the order of up to a foot or so deep (?). They, too, were formed originally, be it understood, more by a scooping or digging in soil; the basins at Miami are chopped out of durable limestone. (More correctly, I believe on basis of in-the-field replications with simulated digging spuds here, they were "percussively reduced").

There is an entryway to the lodge at Macon, too and this entryway is directly lined up with the center of the dias on the other side of the room. The plat shows a bearing taken as S77 deg. 15 min. E on this axis but neglects to include a N indicator. I have assumed that the eagle is to the S side of the chamber (left side of A). For ease of comparison, I have also rotated the Miami Circle with its S side to left in B, too. I note this caution since the Circle is customarily shown in reproductions with N at top. If a dias is another component that might have "come along" with the idea of basin-digging and the presence of finished basalt axes (see further below) then the intrusion of the modern septic tank at the S end of the Stone Circle has obliterated any possibility of detecting such evidence at Miami. From the drawing you can see that at Ocmulgee, they additionally had a central firepit (we lacked totally at Miami) and four large post holes for massive uprights. We likewise had no such corresponding posts at Miami. In A, these supported a rectangular frame from which roof jacks led to the surrounding perimeter wall. The whole was covered over outside with sod.

Now one swallow does not a summer make…nor do two. I do not want to be misquoted (I doubtless will be) to the effect that I "said" the two different basin-ring sites derive from the same or even similar causes or factors. I did not. And I do not.

I do however, say that, where data suggest even remote affinities susceptible of further investigation in the field or in the literature, this ought to be written into (future) dig strategies and vigorously pursued wherever they lead.

They should not just be ignored or shelved.

Tenuous as such a relation might seem at this stage, it is made just that much less tenuous by the current finding in re the axes now and is far more likely in my opinion than that these phenomena relate to visitations or influences from the Maya, or even from sudden flowering of indigenous skills suddenly marshaled towards enigmatic astronomical pursuits and observations, for which neither regional precursors nor hard data have been tendered to date.

Thus, that the evidence of the axes from 8/DA/12 now fingers the very geographic region which I suggested much earlier, may be seen by some as "just a coincidence" or it might even be seen by arch-conservatives perhaps as really nothing at all - but to me it is a wakeup call suggesting at the least that all future excavation planned for here should be aware of this and what it might mean to artifact types that might be perhaps anticipated, or to structures and features yet hidden by the soil from our eyes.

Now perhaps this is all or even much more than we should be inferring, or perhaps better - postulating - from the evidence to date.

Still… one is intrigued by the thought of how either of these sites might have influenced the other, if they did. What scenarios can we imagine that might be relevant here? Of course until we can get a better fix on actual time of origin for the basins at Miami and if they are chronologically sequenced at all, and if a stop-date forward can be derived for them, then this indeed remains quite speculative (as I have just cautioned). We do have one radiocarbon ca. 2000 ybp date from contents of one basin it is true (Miami Herald, 03/09/99). One local press account stated that this meant the basin was that age too, a view which the astute archeological reader here will hopefully eschew. However, if the basins at Miami have this kind of time depth (and thishas not been rigorously demonstrated at all yet), then they are too early by a millenium to relate to the events at Ocmulgee, where the Great Mississippian Earthlodge there dates somewhere around 900 A.D. Despite my general impression that the 8/DA/12 midden was pretty well sealed at depth, it is worth noting perhaps that the Field Director on more than one occasion suggested the basins themselves might have been dug at some later date in the midden's history down through the midden layers themselves. Indeed, an extreme version of this late-date "guesstimating" for the origin of the basins, is the septic tank thesis itself which holds the basins were somehow dug within the past 50 years, the incumbent midden layers we encountered apparently having reweathered again into conformity above them since.

But, suppose for instance, that our Miami basins are much later in time and we assume that at some point in the past (presumably in the closing era of the Mississippian influence at Ocmulgee) shamans, priests or powerful warrior/traders might once (or many times?) have set forth from this cultural "center" (actually quite areally spread out) on trade or foraging expeditions somewhere to the South of Ocmulgee. Among their possessions a numberof basalt axes from the craftsmen of their community - for trade,exchange or barter as might arise. Perhaps 50 or 100 (who knows?) miles out they meet other People. In the way of all humans, talk ensues, and items - including the axes perhaps - are exchanged between the two groups.

The Ocmulgee representatives might even then have returned home. But their axes might have traveled on with the new group another 100 miles, maybe more (who knows?). And then they might have fallen in with yet other sojourners - increasingly likely to be using dugouts further south in this watery realm, perhaps… We know from published studies these kinds of things often took place in aboriginal America. Our nation has long since given up, in archeological digs, evidences permitting just this inference: obsidian from Yellowstone has been found in New England and Ohio; Lake Superior native copper objects traveled as far south as Mexico; I remember in 1950 once, recovering marine shells from the Gulf of Mexico in prehistoric lodges of the Mandan in central South Dakota; marginellia and olivella shells from the Pacific moved inland to the Great Plains and to the Southwestern Desert along ancient aboriginal trade routes.

And so you see it is not at all out of reason that basaltic axes from Macon should come at last to the vicinity of the mouth of the Miami River…

But consider further: perhaps when the first group met the Ocmulgee traders, maybe something more was passed along to them than the axes: maybe they learned the axes (prestige objects perhaps) came complete with a tale of the marvelous place where they were made - a great community of warriors and workers - who gathered periodically in a great underground chamber - a chamber with a row of basins around the perimeter … Big Medicine! And maybe as each succeeding member in the trading chain that led ever further south, acquired the coveted axes, he acquired also (no extra charge!) the tale of how they came from a "great place with basins".

Would such a "tale" arriving -with the axes - in ancient Miami have sufficed to stimulate the locals to take up basin digging? Perhaps not.

But what if one of the shamans or what if the whole group from Ocmulgee itself made the pilgrimage en masse, and arrived among the Tequesta with their treasures? What then?

Is it not conceivable that such luminaries might have induced their hosts or even maybe have undertaken themselves - if the party were large enough in number - to duplicate a "place of the basins?"

Is it happenstance again that the basin rings vary by no more than a foot in their overall diameters?

We must not overlook the marked disparity in the basins, though: the Georgia ones being much more regular and shallower; those in Florida rough, larger, and deeper. But we are suggesting in our little gedanken experiment here that the idea of "basin-ness" is what maybe got carried along here and not a slavish notion about 1:1 duplication. Thirty eight feet? Versus thirty nine feet? If some intimate from the Ocmulgee Earthlodge were among the number, he might know just how long a thong was to be used to inscribe the Circle perimeter and what long-forgotten gauges were to be employed… It is not impossible - certainly - nor even entirely improbable.

It reduces to a question of what evidences must we or future excavators, now look for to check against all this. I suggest here it should be built into our excavation strategy - or the strategy of whomever is to dig here next, if ever. How, as we ask in science, might this be publicly verified? If our pottery inventory can be eventually seriated, and our stratigraphic analysis of the incumbent midden and its relation to the basins below can be unravelled a bit more, and some tight radiocarbon dates derived for crucial levels within the midden, then we will know better how far our scenario might play out here and what it might be worth, if anything.

Someone has said "Well, maybe the flow was the other way around - south to north. Maybe Tequestans went north to instruct their Georgia brethern!" But then you see, you have the axes to explain! The hint, tenuous as it is, is that "things" (axes, for one) and "ideas" (knowledge of basin rings?) may once have travelled south down the Florida peninsula perhaps a millenium ago…

If this were the case, then what also of the intervening cultures and sites along the way? Perhaps the arrival of the axes and the knowledge of a place where they "made basins" came only once, leap-frogging in as it were … but this would be remarkable if true. It is more likely the case, I would be willing to bet, that a check of intervening sites and cultures might shed some additional light on these matters. Unfortunately, my experience has not been in Florida archaeology but in the Northeast, but I would urge regionalists to review their literature and their published earlier finds and sites…

END