A community of skilled artisans, these people fashioned many tools for food-getting, shelter-making and clothing-manufacture as well as for more aesthetic pursuits. With nets woven of vegetable fibre and barbless fishhooks of bone and copper they took fish from nearby streams and lakes. With small, skillfully chipped arrowheads they brought down fowl. Ingenious traps ensnared large game. Stone fleshers were used for stripping the meat and dressing the leather. With bone awls and needles sharpened on grinding stones they sewed leather garments. Stone mortars and pestles pulverized their grain. Stone chisels and axes felled, with the aid of fire, trees for their homes and temples. Cups and forks and spoons carved from shell were their cooking and eating utensils.
[Illustration: A MOUNDVILLE INDIAN'S SHELL CUP.]
[Illustration: COPPER FISHHOOK USED AT MOUNDVILLE IN PREHISTORIC TIMES.]
[Illustration: A MEMENTO OF ABORIGINAL RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES AT MOUNDVILLE.]
Of paramount importance to the Moundville Indian was his religion. The mounds, on which he worshiped, are enduring monuments to the strength and fervor of his faith. Tons and tons of clay, loam and sand he carried to form these towering structures. Atop the earth pyramids he built great wooden temples and special dwelling houses for chieftans and priests.
Ceremonies performed in the temples were elaborate and colorful. Priests attired in symbolic costumes, and bearing numerous esoteric accoutrements, directed the rituals. Ceremonial trappings included beautiful copper breast plates, shell gorgets, and stone discs and pendants, all delicately carved with intricate, allegorical designs. Among these designs were depictions of the skull and arm-bone, the hand and all-seeing eye, entwined rattlesnakes, and the horned or plumed serpent. Similar designs are found in the symbolic art of the Indians of Central America and Mexico, the Mayas and Aztecs.
[Illustration: PIPES WHICH THE MOUNDVILLE INDIANS MOLDED FROM CLAY.]
Games and contests were popular among the Moundville Indians. One favorite game had the combined features of our football and baseball. Another was similar to a combination of bowling and shuffleboard.
Tobacco-smoking was practiced not as a habit but as a ceremony. Beautiful pipes--some carved from stone, others molded from clay--were smoked through a long cane stem, the bowl resting on the ground. Some pipes were shaped to resemble the human body. Others were carved or molded in the shape of birds, animals and insects.