Moundville Archaeological Park

Story and photos
by Kathleen Walls

There is a lot of history to see and do in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You can visit beautiful historic homes like Jemison Mansion, Battle-Friedman House, Jemison Van De Graaf Mansion, stay at the 1823 Bama Bed and Breakfast, tour the Civil Rights Trail and First African Baptist Church and go farther back at the Alabama Museum of Natural History. Even football fans can get a touch of history at the University of Alabama at the Catherine and Pettus Randall Welcome Center that houses Bryce Mental Health Museum as well as offering future students a glimpse of life where the Crimson Tide Rolls.

Moundsville Archaeological Park

Moundsville Archaeological Park takes you back much farther to the Mississippian era, around 1200 AD. The mounds here differ from the Woodland era of conical burial mounds. I had an informative tour of the park and its museum with Dr. Ted Nelson, director of Moundville Archaeological Park.

The mounds provide a luscious green framework around the visitors' center as you drive into the park. I could see that these were not natural hills. Dr. Nelson explained that their main purpose was to hold structures. He pointed out, "Most of them are gonna be flat topped, and they'll have features on the tops of them where it looked like where you would see house structures. You'd have the elites and the chiefs living on the tops of some mounds, other mounds would hold temples, and some of them held artisan workshops. And then people lived all around them."

Dr. Nelson explained that the place had to have been planned, "Because they're equidistant around Mound A, which is the large mound in the middle. The mounds were built pretty much in the cardinal directions. So that is north, where that big mound is, and then south. And most of the mounds are flat topped and then they'll have flat-ish sides. And they're oriented north, south, east, and west."

While that is some debate as to how many mounds there were originally, they definitely have at least 29 that are surrounding a central plaza. The construction of these went on for 100 to 150 years.

Long before football became the hottest sport on campuses, Paleo Indians played their own games of stickball and chunky on theses leveled plazas. These people, ancestors of the Muscogee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Alabama, and Coushatta tribes, picked this area on the banks of the beautiful Black Warrier River for a reason. They could get fish from the river, swim, paddle, and use the river water to nourish their crops. These people were moving from the hunter gatherer stage to the early agricultural stage.

There are two mounds on the site that visitors can walk on, Mound A and Mound B. Mound B is the tallest mound not only in the park, but it's the tallest Mississippian mound in Alabama and the second tallest Mississippian mound in the nation. This is also the second largest Mississippian mound site in the nation. I climbed Mount A and recommend it. It's not a difficult climb as there are modern stairs and it offers a spectacular view of the site.

It must have been a very colorful place, full of life, for about 200 years. But around 1350 to 1400, they began moving away, and the site became abandoned. Archaeologists don't know why.

Jones Archaeological Museum

The Jones Archaeological Museum helps flesh out the people of the mounds. "Lost Realm of the Black Warrior" features over 200 ancient artifacts, several recreated scenes of life at the mounds, and a multimedia show.

The largest exhibits you see as you enter tells about society at Moundsville. "The Procession: Splendor at Ancient Moundville" portrays a young elite woman being carried on a raised platform by four noble warriors from her tribe to meet her future husband, probably the heir to the ruler of Moundville. The people in the exhibit were modeled on real native Americans.

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They have a cafe at the musuem and they also have a couple of nature trails. Dr. Nelson recommends, "The best one is that one right there, the Douglas Nature Trail, which goes down to the river."

The site hosts many festivals throughout the year. The RV Park at the site offers both primitive and hook up sites for RVers.

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