Ten Great Native American Mound Sites
The Native Americans of Pre-Colonial North America built thousands of mounds across the continent which served various purposes and sometimes reached heights over 100 feet. Many of the mound sites were thriving urban centers – such as Cahokia in Illinois – while others seem to have served strictly religious/ritualistic purposes, as in the case of Pinson Mounds in Tennessee.
European settlers, not knowing what the mounds were and periodically mistaking them for naturally formed hills, destroyed many out of ignorance while others were purposefully eliminated to make room for town and city expansions and still more were looted for treasures to be sold on the antiquities market and severely damaged or demolished in that way. Even when it was understood that these mounds were significant paragons of ancient native architecture, landowners still destroyed them to prevent the state or other agencies from trying to take their land in the interests of preservation.
In the present, there are still many mound sites extant throughout the United States, some protected as archaeological parks, others on private lands, and every one of them offers a different insight into the cultures of the different Native American Nations that built them. A little-known site such as Man Mound in Wisconsin is just as important as one better known such as Serpent Mound in Ohio. The following list necessarily leaves out many important sites but those selected have been chosen for the type they represent and their contribution to a better understanding of Native American cultures.
The mounds were built from c. 5000 BCE up through the period of European colonization which is usually given, in this case, as c. 1540 CE when the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto (l. c. 1500-1542) traveled with his army through the regions of present-day Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi – all of which had mound sites - searching for gold and the De Soto expedition records natives living on or near these large mounds. De Soto killed a number of natives when they would not hand over the gold he insisted they were hiding but did more damage in spreading European diseases the natives had no immunity to. When later European explorers reached the region, the natives there had no idea who had built the mounds because their elders, who kept the history of the nation alive through oral tradition, had long ago died. The ten sites presented below which exemplify this tradition are:
Watson Brake (Louisiana, c. 3500 BCE)
Poverty Point (Louisiana, c. 1700-1100 BCE)
Serpent Mound (Ohio, built either c. 320 BCE or c. 1000-1750 CE)
Effigy Mounds (Iowa, c. 500 BCE-1000 CE)
Pinson Mounds (Tennessee, c. 1-200 CE)
Observatory Hill Mounds (Wisconsin, c. 500-1200 CE)
Cahokia (Illinois, c. 600-c. 1350 CE)
Etowah (Georgia, c. 1000-1550 CE)
Moundville (Alabama, c. 1100-c. 1450 CE)
Spiro Mounds (Oklahoma, c. 900-1450 CE)
It was not until the 19th century that the descendants of the early European immigrants took an interest in the mounds and, at that time, they refused to believe they were built by Native Americans who were considered “too simple” to have managed such an enormous undertaking. Even though scholars and intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries recognized the mounds as “native in origin”, that claim was not widely accepted until the mid-20th century.
It is now understood that different Native American cultures created the mounds at different times, using similar methods, beginning in the Archaic Period (c. 8000-7900 BCE), continuing through the Woodland Period (c. 500 BCE-1100 CE), and on into the period of the Mississippian Culture (c. 1100-1540 CE). The mounds are all characterized, no matter what their original purpose, by a high degree of technical skill in engineering, evidence of a large labor force, and some sort of central authority directing logistics, supply, and construction.
