Location: Highway 710 in Robeson County, near the intersection of Highway 72.
County: Robeson
Original Date Cast: 2023
In 1974, the local American Indian community sounded an outcry against the excavation of Buie Mound. By this time, the mound had been ravaged for over a century by grave robbers, archaeologists, and amateur relic hunters. On May 15, 1971, during a spring meeting of the North Carolina Archaeological Society, under the direction of Dr. David A. McClean from St. Andrews Presbyterian College and Dr. J. Ned Woodall from Wake Forest University along with fifty members of the archaeological society, a formalized dig began unearthing the past encapsulated in the rare Carolina coastal plain sand mound on the land of John Todd Buie. This formalized dig produced a wealth of American Indian cultural material that associated the site with the Mississippian Mound building period. From recorded memory, Native people have fought to protect and publicly acknowledged the presence and importance of Buie Mound. This marker placement aims to pull together the memory of the Buie Mound and the activism of Native people to protect the mound as a sacred site.
The Buie Mound represents the presence of a highly sophisticated Mississippian mound building society in Robeson County, North Carolina. Mississippian culture flourished from ca. 800 to 1600 A.D./C.E. from the Atlantic to the western Great Plains, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. The central geographical core of the culture lay in what is now the southeastern United States. Governed by descendant leaders, Mississippian peoples were diverse from region to region, living in varying landscapes and belonging to multiple language families. However, these people were connected as part of powerful, paramount chiefdoms that governed vast regions. This interlocked societal network informed culture, religion, world view, and kinship.
Two of the many significant hallmarks of Mississippian culture are earthworks in the form of mounds and material culture that express the symbolic aesthetic of the people. Welk shell engravings featuring iconography, personal adornment made of shells and copper, stamped and impressed pottery, projectiles and points all communicate information about Mississippian worldview and lifeways. Mounds were created to demonstrate social and rulership power by elevating structures, such as elite leaders’ dwellings and religious temples on the landscape. These “temple mounds” were also burial mounds that were built upon successive dynasties. Celestial mounds served as performative calendars on the landscape that marked seasonal events such as solstice and equinox. Burial mounds protected ancestors and served as grave markers. Effigy mounds served as earthly representation of cosmological and spiritual beings. Based on the types of burials and the associated funerary objects, archaeologists theorize that Buie Mound was a temple mound.
The lure of the Buie Mound has existed for well over two centuries among grave robbers and relic hunters who have plundered the mound for decades, stealing artifacts that include human remains and funerary objects. Many of these remains and artifacts are most likely lost forever. In the 1970s, archaeological digs conducted by St. Andrews Presbyterian College, Wake Forest University and Pembroke State University (the present-day University of North Carolina-Pembroke) continued to uncover human remains and artifacts. These materials were researched in the 1970s, resulting in a formal report called the Buie Mound Report that concluded the people were linked to the early Woodland and late Mississippian mound building eras.
The archaeology examined from this site revealed a thriving community who used the mound for ceremony and to bury their people with reverence. Most importantly, like the Town Creek Indian Mound State Historic Site in Mt. Gilead, North Carolina, and the Cherokee Nikwasi Mound historic site in western North Carolina, Buie Mound was home to North Carolina’s Indigenous people. The descendants of these people have maintained a presence and voice concerning the shared knowledge and legacy of these important places. Although the traditional Indigenous placename of Buie Mound is lost to time, the acknowledgement and historical significance of the mound still hold importance among the Indian and non-Indian communities alike as a sacred place.
In February 1975, The Carolina Indian Voice Newspaper editor, Bruce Barton published an article entitled “Digging Indian Bones” that publicly sounded the outcry of local Indian people astonished and devastated by the excavation of the mound. The outcry was on the heels of a recent call to action from the Indian community insisting that historic site administrators cover the publicly exhibited human remains at Town Creek Indian Mound Historic Site. Indian communities came together to emphasize and end the morbid, unethical practice of displaying Indigenous human remains to the public. Community efforts resulted in the site recovering the remains and amending exhibit policy forbidding the exhibition and display of human remains at Town Creek Indian Mound and any other North Carolina State Historic Site. Indian community members planned to enact the same efforts to influence the archaeology group to stop excavating the Buie Mound. In September of 1974, a unified Indigenous community group visited the site and questioned workers about their activities and why they were unearthing ancestral remains. The presence of the Indigenous community, one that represented the majority of the county’s population, proved to be persuasive, and excavation ceased. The cessation of excavation was celebrated as a significant victory for the Indian community.
The site of Buie Mound holds many secrets locked in the landscape. The village that was there, the leader’s names, the intimate details of many generations of lives are gone, only vestiges of the past remain of their existence. Their descendants, however, are still here, still holding onto the traces of their early history with as much authenticity and authority as possible. In recent memory, Indian people in Robeson County have been denied their identity and heritage due to racism and social injustice. Today, archaeology (science), regional history and Indigenous history intersect to tell a more true and much fuller story about North Carolina’s original people. This historic sign acknowledges the powerful, sophisticated, and important American Indian civilization– not only to North Carolina, but to our nation, an existence and contribution worth sharing with North Carolina’s public by way of a historic marker.
References:
Bruce Barton, “Digging Indian Bones Discovered in Robeson County.” Carolina Indian Voice Newspaper (Pembroke, NC), February 6, 1975.
Jeffrey D. Irwin, Wayne C. J. Boyko, Joseph M. Herbert, and Chad Braley, “Woodland Burial Mounds in the North Carolina Sandhills and Southern Coastal Plain,” North Carolina Archeology Journal, no. 48, (January 1999).
Richard F. Townsend, ed., Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (2004).
Ruth Y. Wetmore, “Report on excavations at the Buie Mound, Robeson County, North Carolina,” Notebook (Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina), 10 (1978).
James Hogue Wilson, “The Archaeology and Paleodemography of the McFaden Burial Mound (31Bw67),” in Janet E. Levy, ed., Skeletal Analysis in Southeastern Archaeology (1986).