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Title
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Moundville Archaeology
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Date
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2025
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Bibliographic Citation
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Thompson, Ian. 2025. Moundville Summary. Indigenous Alabama - Choctaw.
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annotates
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The town of Moundville (1TU500) was the urban capital of a large farming population on the Black Warrior River. It has cultural ties with the earlier Shilo phase of southern Tennessee. One current interpretation of the available archaeological evidence is that around AD 1075 a small conclave from Tennessee moved onto the Black Warrior, bringing a corn-focused foodway with them. Soon, they were joined by a much larger population (Miller III) that moved in from present-day eastern Mississippi. Over a century, the two groups amalgamated to become the early Moundville community. Construction of Moundville’s 200-acre town began around AD 1120. At the center of town was a flat plaza, which likely served as the site of ceremonies and ballgames. Twenty-nine earth mounds were constructed around this plaza in a symmetrical pattern that physically reflected the community’s moiety and clan structure.
By AD 1225, the farming community associated with Moundville had grown to an estimated 10,000 people, with smaller settlements stretching out for 20 miles along the river. Moundville had become the second largest population center north of the Valley of Mexico. Yet, its population history is one of dynamic change. By AD 1300, the population of the town itself was shrinking rapidly, as people began to move into adjacent, affiliated settlements on the Black Warrior, or left the region all together to build daughter communities in other places. The Moundville town seems to have increasingly become a sacred site reserved for the residences of community leaders and as a place where people from the nearby settlements returned to bury their dead. Today’s Muskogean-speaking Tribes recognize Moundville and its daughter communities as being jointly ancestral.
Choctaw Nation recognizes Moundville’s daughter communities in present-day Marengo County and portions of the Alabama River as being specifically ancestral Choctaw. During the 1500s, the Tribal name for the Black Warrior River was Oka Chito, which is a Choctaw name meaning “Big Water”. The De Soto Commission concluded that the towns of Pafalaya encountered by de Soto were the Moundville site and its surrounding Black Warrior River Valley settlements. Into the early 1700s, Pafalaia was a Tribal name for the Choctaw people. Moundville was abandoned in the mid-1600s, and became part of a no-mans land between eastern and western Muskogean-speaking Tribes. In reference to this, the Black Warrior River’s Choctaw name changed to Apotaka Hvcha (Boundary River). The Moundville archaeological site is located on Choctaw treaty land.
