700-Year-Old Copper Plate May Show a Woman Dressed as a Warrior
Found in a Georgia grave, the hammered copper plate shows a figure in a bird costume holding a severed head, and experts still argue whether that warrior is a man or a woman.
In the late 19th century, an archaeologist digging into a burial mound in Georgia found a sheet of hammered copper decorated with a striking image: a person in a bird costume, holding a severed head in one hand and a club or mace in the other. The plate is about 700 years old, and after more than a century of study, experts still argue over a basic question about the figure on it — whether it shows a man or a woman dressed as a warrior.
What the figure is holding
The plate is roughly 11 inches (28 centimeters) tall, and the picture on it was hammered into the copper. The figure wears an elaborate bird costume. In its left hand it carries a severed head, held by the hair. Its right hand holds a club or mace. The figure also wears a pleated skirt or loincloth that may have been made from human scalps.
- Height: roughly 11 inches (28 centimeters)
- Material: hammered copper
- Made: 13th century, likely at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois
- Found: in a burial at the Etowah Indian Mounds archaeological site in Georgia
- Kept at: the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
The artifact is known as Rogan Plate 1, or the "Birdman" plate. It is one of two hammered copper plates that Smithsonian archaeologist John P. Rogan unearthed in the 1880s while digging in a burial mound at Etowah.
Buried in Georgia, made hundreds of miles away
Etowah was a centuries-old village, occupied by thousands of Native Americans from 1000 to 1550. It was part of the mound-building, or Mississippian, phase of Indigenous occupation.
The plate had been buried with a high-status person who likely died at Etowah in the mid-14th century. But experts believe the plate itself was made decades earlier, hundreds of miles away at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, and traded south to Etowah. So the person in the grave was buried with an heirloom: an object made in the 13th century that had travelled a long distance before it was laid in the ground.
That journey fits a bigger picture. Early Indigenous groups in the southeastern United States had extensive trade networks and shared a common artistic and ceremonial tradition known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Other well-known sites from the same world include Moundville in Alabama and Cahokia in Illinois.
Why the debate has lasted so long
The bird-human figure is a common image in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Over the years it has been called a dancing warrior, an eagle warrior and an eagle dancer.
The nature of the human figure on this particular plate, though, has been debated for over a century. Whether the warrior shown is a man or a woman is one of the questions still open: the plate has been described as a possible depiction of a woman holding a weapon and a severed head. Nothing about the object has ended that argument.
What the plate does show clearly is a connection between places. Copper dug and worked in one region ended up in a grave in another, carrying an image that people across a wide area recognised. The head, the mace and the bird costume were part of a shared visual language — one that is still being read, piece by piece, more than a hundred years after the plate came out of the ground.