700-Year-Old Cahokia Copper Plate Recasts 'Birdman' as Female or Two-Spirit Warrior
Updated
Updated · Livescience.com · Oct 19
700-Year-Old Cahokia Copper Plate Recasts 'Birdman' as Female or Two-Spirit Warrior
1 articles · Updated · Livescience.com · Oct 19
Summary
A 13th-century copper plate long labeled the "Birdman" may depict a female or two-spirit warrior, challenging more than a century of interpretations that cast the figure as male.
Billie Follensbee and Katie Buford argued in a 2017 study that the two Etowah plates show slender bodies and prominent right breasts, while the sex of the high-status burial's skeleton remains unclear.
The roughly 11-inch artifact was unearthed in the 1880s at Georgia's Etowah mounds but is thought to have been made earlier at Cahokia in Illinois and traded south through Mississippian networks.
That reinterpretation broadens the plate's meaning from a male chieftain's emblem to possible evidence that gender-variant or "manly-hearted" individuals held elite, publicly honored roles in Indigenous societies.