Moundville Archaeological Site

Moundville sits on the Black Warrior River in Hale County, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was the political and ceremonial center of a Mississippian chiefdom between the 11th and 16th centuries, and the park today covers 185 acres run by the University of Alabama Museums.

The mounds are flat-topped earthen pyramids built in stages, arranged around a rectangular plaza. The largest stand on the northern edge and they get smaller as the ring runs around to the south. Mound B, just north of the central Mound A, rises about 58 feet and has two access ramps. Scholars read the layout as a picture of ranked clans, with the highest-ranking ones on the big northern mounds.

At its height the town covered roughly 300 acres and was protected on three sides by a wooden palisade, with the river bluff guarding the fourth. Moundville is the second-largest site of the classic Middle Mississippian era in the United States, after Cahokia in Illinois.

People lived here from about 1000 AD, and around 1150 AD their leaders began to turn a local settlement into a regional center. Most of the public building of the plaza and mounds came after 1200. The people grew maize, traded for copper, mica, galena and marine shell, and left behind pottery, stonework and embossed copper that scholars rank among the finest of the region.

By 1300 the site worked more as a religious and political center than as a town, and mound building ceased in the 14th century. Why people left is not known. By the mid-16th century, when the army of Hernando de Soto passed through the region, Moundville was abandoned. Researchers connect its probable descendants to Muskogean-speaking peoples of the Southeast.

Looting and early digging damaged the mounds in the early 1900s. Local citizens bought the land in the 1920s, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews stabilized the mounds against erosion in the 1930s. The park opened to the public in 1939, with a museum on the grounds, remodeled in 2010. Moundville became a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Questions about the return of human remains and funerary objects to descendant nations are still being worked through.