{"it":{"id":"NAM-009","kind":"site","sub":"North America","name":"Moundville Archaeological Site","place":"United States","lat":33.005,"lon":-87.631,"date":"Site  The site was occupied by Native Americans of the Mississippian culture from…","mat":"diorite","nfacts":1,"tags":["North America"],"sum":"Moundville in Alabama has 29 earthen platform mounds arranged around a plaza of about 32 hectares (single source), a town of the Mississippian culture.","src":[356],"nsrc":2,"why":"A Mississippian capital in Alabama whose layout seems to map who outranked whom.","yt":"What did the arrangement say about who held power?","rel":["NAM-003","NAM-005"],"hook":"Moundville's mounds ring a plaza in Alabama, second in size only to Cahokia, a palisade around them."},"S":{"356":["Wikipedia: Moundville Archaeological Site","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moundville_Archaeological_Site"]},"rec":{"id":"NAM-009","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"It is a steep","a":"height","v":"58","u":"ft","o":"It is a steep, 58 ft-tall pyramidal mound with two access ramps.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moundville_Archaeological_Site&oldid=1378830111","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1378830111 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2156"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"REF7 One of his many discoveries was a finely carved diorite bowl depicting a crested wood duck.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moundville_Archaeological_Site&oldid=1378830111"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"Site  The site was occupied by Native Americans of the Mississippian culture from around 1000 AD to 1450 AD.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"33.00467","lon":"-87.63107","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree (wave7 hand-review: OSM feature 'Moundville Archaeological Park')","b":"V","note":"hand-reviewed: Wikidata vs OSM leisure/park delta 0.0013 deg (~0.14 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/508634946"},"src":[{"id":"S0345","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moundville_Archaeological_Site&oldid=1378830111"},{"id":"S0544","t":"Wikipedia: Moundville Archaeological Site","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moundville_Archaeological_Site"},{"id":"VNAM-009-3","t":"Ancient Site – Moundville Archaeological Park","u":"https://moundville.museums.ua.edu/about-moundville/ancient-site/"},{"id":null,"t":"Blitz, John H., “Moundville Archaeological Park,” Encyclopedia of Alabama (Alabama Humanities).","u":"https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/moundville-archaeological-park/"}],"sum":"In the 1920s, Walter B. Jones, Alabama's state geologist, mortgaged his own house. The money was to help buy a stretch of land on a bluff above the Black Warrior River, covered in great earthen mounds, and turn it into a park. A collector had already steamed upriver and carried off its finest treasures. Jones meant to save what was left. The ground he bought had once been one of the most carefully planned towns in ancient North America, and the plan itself, read correctly, may be the clearest map of power any Native American chiefdom left behind.\n\nMoundville lies in Hale County, near modern Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Native Americans of the Mississippian culture lived there from about AD 1000 to 1450. The Mississippian world flourished along the river valleys of the Southeast and Midwest, in towns built around plazas and flat-topped earthen mounds that carried buildings rather than burials under a peak. At its most populous Moundville was a village of about three hundred acres on the bluff; the park today covers 185 acres. Estimates put its people at around 1,000 to 3,000 within the walls, with perhaps 10,000 more in the surrounding valley, a string of affiliated settlements running some 25 miles downriver. Maize surpluses fed them and gave craftspeople time to specialise and trade. The University of Alabama Museums, which run the park, rank Moundville second only to Cahokia, in Illinois, in size and complexity.\n\nBefore the town proper, the area was already thickly settled, with a few very small single-mound centres. Then, around AD 1200, came a deliberate reshaping. A great plaza was laid out, and a bastioned wooden palisade, a wall of posts with projecting towers, closed the roughly square town on three sides. Mound A, at the centre of the plaza, was the early focus, with buildings arranged around a smaller plaza beside it that was later filled in. The counts vary: the museums give twenty-six mounds inside the enclosure, while other surveys count 29 platform mounds in all. One single-source figure gives the plaza some 32 hectares. Just north of Mound A rises Mound B, a steep pyramid of earth 58 feet tall with two ramps climbing its sides.\n\nIt is the arrangement that fascinates archaeologists. Larger mounds that held nobles' houses alternated around the plaza with smaller ones used for burials and other purposes. The largest residential mounds, and those with the richest burials, line the northern edge, and scholars think the highest-ranking clans lived there. Archaeologists have called the layout a sociogram, a social order drawn on the ground. Where a family's mound stood told everyone where that family stood.\n\nThe dead tell the same story. Most residents were buried near their houses with simple goods such as tools. The elite were buried in the small mounds with objects of stone, copper and shell brought from far away. Several adults in the northernmost burial mounds were laid to rest with copper axes found nowhere else on the site. Copper is too soft for a working axe, so these were probably ceremonial emblems, marks of chiefly rank. From such evidence archaeologists infer at least three tiers: workers and farmers, elites, and chiefs with ceremonial axes. Here the ancient logic of rule is laid bare. A ruler does not need a useful axe; he needs one nobody else may own.\n\nThen Moundville changed character. By about 1350, the museums say, it lost the look of a town but kept its political and ceremonial role. Between 1300 and 1450 the mounds gradually fell out of use and most people left, founding new single-mound sites along the river. Moundville became mainly a burial ground, a place the living visited to honour the dead. The grave goods of this late period carry a new set of symbols: a cross within a circle, a hand and eye, falcons, and winged and horned serpents. Scholars read them as signs of a new focus on ancestors, war and death. Imports of prestige goods for the nobility fell away, and by the 1500s most of the area was empty. When Hernando de Soto's army passed through the region in 1540, the site probably had few inhabitants, and no village in the expedition accounts can be matched to it with certainty.\n\nWho were Moundville's heirs? The sources differ here. The older accounts stress that the gap makes it hard to link the town's people to any known tribe. Others point to archaeological evidence that its people dispersed to the Tombigbee and Alabama river regions and, from the spread of Moundville-style artifacts and of Muskogean-speaking peoples at the time of European contact, name the Muskogee, Choctaw and Chickasaw nations as its probable descendants.\n\nThe site's modern rediscovery came slowly. Nathaniel Thomas Lupton, president of the University of Alabama, produced a fairly accurate map in 1869. The first major digging came in 1905 and 1906, when Clarence Bloomfield Moore, a Philadelphia lawyer, worked from his steamboat, The Gopher, and shipped finds back to Philadelphia. Among them was a finely carved diorite bowl in the form of a crested wood duck. Even in his own day some professionals criticised his methods. Alarm at what he took led Alabama to pass an antiquities law in 1915, forbidding the removal of further artifacts from the state. In the 1930s, during the Depression, workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps stabilised the mounds against erosion and helped excavate, and in 1939 the Jones Archaeological Museum opened on the site, named for the geologist who had put his home on the line.\n\nWhat remains unexplained is the hinge of the whole story. The museums say plainly that neither Moundville's rise nor its decline is well understood, and archaeologists have not settled exactly when or why it was abandoned. A society capable of laying out a town as a diagram of rank, of drawing goods from distant sources, and of holding its people together for generations did not leave a record of why it turned its capital into a cemetery.\n\nWas it a choice made by rulers, turning a living town into a sacred landscape of ancestors to anchor their authority, or a decline they could not stop? And if a chiefdom could encode its whole social order into earth and space this precisely, were the Mississippian chiefdoms closer to early kingdoms than we usually admit?","qs":["Were Mississippian chiefdoms more like early kingdoms than we usually admit?","Why would a town keep its ceremonies after its people left?","What does a palisade tell us about who Moundville feared?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Denny_Chimes_Tower.JPG/1280px-Denny_Chimes_Tower.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Denny_Chimes_Tower.JPG","title":"Denny Chimes Tower.JPG","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Rtr10","cap":"Close up of the bell tower on Denny Chimes."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Feline_statuette_Moundville_Altairisfar_2010.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feline_statuette_Moundville_Altairisfar_2010.jpg","title":"Feline statuette Moundville Altairisfar 2010.jpg","lic":"CC BY 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","by":"User:Altairisfar (Jeffrey Reed)","cap":"Cropped version, of \"Feline statuette excavated at the Moundville Archaeological Park in Moundville, Hale County, Alabama, United States. Housed onsite in the J"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Mound_Builder_City.jpeg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mound_Builder_City.jpeg","title":"Mound Builder City.jpeg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"user:RHorning","cap":"An artists conception of the Emerald Site, (22 AD 504), a Plaquemine culture mound site in Adams County, Mississippi inhabited from 1200 to 1700 CE."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Moundville_Archaeological_Park_64.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moundville_Archaeological_Park_64.JPG","title":"Moundville Archaeological Park 64.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Altairisfar (Jeffrey Reed)","cap":"The Rattlesnake Disk. A ceremonial stone palette plowed up by a 19th century farmer in Moundville, Hale County, Alabama, United States. Housed in the Jones Arch"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Diorite","h":"Made of","s":[103]}],"hs":{"103":["Wikipedia: Moundville Archaeological Site (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moundville_Archaeological_Site"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/NAM-009.webp","w":1280,"h":2369,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Denny_Chimes_Tower.JPG/1280px-Denny_Chimes_Tower.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}