Day 144: The Ancients

After a sad goodbye to Erica, Brad and Greyson this morning, we left Atlanta and drove south to Macon. Thousands of years prior to Otis Redding living there, the ancestors of the Creek Indians built incredible earthen homes, businesses and temples. These ancient peoples, known as the Ocmulgee, were gifted potters (using wooden paddles to "stamp" elaborate patterns into the pots' surfaces), and their understanding of astronomy is mind-boggling. Their meeting lodge was aligned with the sun so that its rays would land on the seat of the leader one day every six months, never reaching the interior at any other time. They participated in a sophisticated trade system with other tribes and communities throughout what we now know as the Southeast.

DeSoto's explorations in the region, in the 16th century, brought devastating diseases that nearly wiped out most of the Ocmulgee people. Those that survived adjusted their lifestyles to accommodate the changes brought by new neighbors, the Europeans. In the early 1800s, the native people's descendants (the Creeks, or their preferred name, "Muscogee") eventually were forced from the lands by so-called treaties written by colonials. Their journey to Oklahoma is known as the Trail of Tears...something we've been learning about the last few days. It's a scar on the history of the South that is often lost in the shadow of slavery. Yet its truth is equally condemning.

Tomorrow we'll face another disturbing chapter in the South's history...that of the Andersonville National Historic Site, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in which thousands of Union soldiers died. We'll also pay a visit to the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site in nearby Plains. For tonight, we'll sleep under stars that the Ocmulgee knew so well, though they'd be shocked by their dimness in this age of light pollution. We're amazed by this and the other sites of ancient history we've visited; so often, they're literally in the midst of modern culture, which doesn't appreciate or even acknowledge their place in our country's timeline.

A cut-away of a mound's construction. Nearly 50 seats, such as the girls are sitting in, ringed the interior.

the site's reconstructed meeting mound...built above an excavated clay floor (below) that features an intact form of an eagle, part of the leaders' platform that was lit up in the sun's biannual pass. Downtown Macon is just beyond it...less than a mile away.

The dig site, excavated in the 1930s, was the largest in U.S. history, with more than 800 men and women working to uncover its acres of secrets.

emerging from the mound's two-foot-wide (and 8-ft.-thick) passage