About a century ago, the Smithsonian collected artifacts from Georgia’s Etowah Indian Mounds. Since then, they’ve been sitting in storage; most haven’t been studied or displayed publicly. Now those artifacts are coming back to Georgia, to go on display for the first time.
To choose pieces for this show, curators from Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville made a few trips to the Smithsonian.
“It turns out they had tens of thousands of pieces there in cabinets. We kept opening cabinets and kept marveling at things,” said Jose Santamaria, executive director of Tellus.
That’s tens of thousands of pieces from the Etowah Indian Mounds, which are nearby. A thousand years ago, the mounds were part of a city in the Mississippian culture, home to thousands of people. Now, they’re part of a state park, popular for school field trips.
The exhibit pulled together a selection of pieces from the Smithsonian. There are intricate items, like a shell with a carving of a snake, and an embossed copper image known as a “birdman.”
