Moundville Archaeological Park

Moundville is the city the mounds made. On the bluff over the Black Warrior River, the Mississippian people built one of the largest towns in pre-Columbian North America — three hundred acres behind a palisade, twenty-nine earthen mounds around a plaza artificially leveled with basketloads of soil, thousands of people in a planned community second only to Cahokia. The mounds weren't tombs; they were the platforms for the nobles' houses and the temples, the architecture of a chiefdom organized by matrilineal clans.

The city ran its three centuries and changed — around 1350 the town emptied while the ceremonial center kept going, the mounds becoming a necropolis as the population moved away. By the time Europeans reached the Southeast in the 1540s, Moundville was mostly abandoned; the descendents are the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and the other nations that still claim the place as ancestral.

The archaeology is the file's spine — Clarence Moore's early digs, the CCC excavations of the '30s, the museum with the burials that were closed to view in 1989 when the descendant nations' claims were finally heard. The file keeps what the ground holds: the platform mounds still standing over the river, the plaza where a city of thousands lived, and the nations that still call it home.

Moundville Archaeological Park is the archive's Mississippian file — the planned city of twenty-nine mounds on the Black Warrior, second only to Cahokia, the chiefdom's capital whose descendants still claim it.