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<< Our Photo Pages >> Town Creek Indian Mound - Misc. Earthwork in United States in The South

Submitted by AKFisher on Monday, 24 November 2014  Page Views: 14519

Multi-periodSite Name: Town Creek Indian Mound
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 232.914 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: The South Type: Misc. Earthwork
Nearest Town: Mount Gilead
Latitude: 35.182806N  Longitude: 79.929472W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
4 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
4 Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4

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Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by Creative Commons : English: Town Creek Indian Mound, a ceremonial mound built by the Pee Dee. North Carolina, USA. Creative Commons image by Zachary Williams (Vote or comment on this photo)
Town Creek Indian Mound is a National Historic Landmark near Mount Gilead, Montgomery County, North Carolina. The site preserves a ceremonial mound built by the Pee Dee, a group of Mississippian mound building people that thrived in the Pee Dee region of North and South Carolina during the Pre-Columbian era from about 1100 to 1400 CE.

The Pee Dee were part of a larger complex society of Native Americans known as the Mississippian culture, that built mounds for their spiritual and political purposes. They also participated in a widespread network of trading that stretched from Georgia through South Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and as well as the mountain and Piedmont regions of North Carolina.

Town Creek Indian Mound is the only historic site in North Carolina that is dedicated to American Indian heritage, and is considered to be one of the recognized Mississippian chiefdoms. The site is composed of a single large platform mound with a surrounding village and palisade. The Town Creek site is not large by Mississippian standards. The mound was built over the remains of an earlier rectangular shaped earth lodge.

There are several facilities open to the public at Town Creek Indian Mound. The reconstructed ceremonial center includes the mound with a temple atop, a minor temple and the mortuary. The visitor center houses interpretive exhibits, a gift shop, and audiovisual programs. Town Creek Indian Mound has several trails and outdoor monuments. The visitor center, minor temple, and mortuary have disabled access.

A total of 563 burials that are thought to be of Pee Dee tribe members have been found at Town Creek Indian Mound. Many of the burial sites appear to have been fairly simple and common, with the bodies casually placed in the graves. Some were found buried with their bodies fully extended, while others may have been re-buried in a bundle of bones. The remains of young children and infants have been found tightly wrapped in deerskins in burial urns.

Various special events held throughout the year focus on the lifestyle of the Pee Dee. Self guided tours of the rebuilt structures and mound occur during normal operational hours. Group tours are given with advance scheduling. Groups are led through some hands-on activities.

Admission to Town Creek Indian Mound is free.

Town Creek Indian Mound
509 Town Creek Mound Rd.
Mt. Gilead, NC 27306
Phone: (910) 439-6802

Official Web Site and see also their Flickr Pages

Read more at Wikipedia


Note: Rubbish dig casts new light on pre-Columbian village
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Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by Creative Commons : Panoramic picture of Town Creek Indian Mound Date: 18 June 2010 Creative Commons image, Dincher took the pictures and Ruhrfisch stitched them together (Vote or comment on this photo)

Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by AKFisher : Large pottery vessels with covers from the Town Creek mound site in Montgomery, NC. From: UNC Archaeology Research Labs. Photo courtesy Dr Greg Little, author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthworks (2016).  (Vote or comment on this photo)

Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by AKFisher : Display inside the recreated temple on the large mound at the Town Creek site. Photo courtesy Dr Greg Little, author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthworks (2016).  (Vote or comment on this photo)

Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by AKFisher : Photo courtesy Dr Greg Little, author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthworks (2016). The Town Creek, North Carolina archaeological site has a restored temple mound, temple, representative house, palisade wall with bastions, and a museum. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by AKFisher : Temple mound at Town Creek, North Carolina with a reconstructed palisade wall behind it (photo from late 1980s). Today the mound has the sides overgrown, presumably to keep people from climbing on the sides. Photo courtesy Dr Greg Little, author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthworks (2016).

Town Creek Indian Mound
Town Creek Indian Mound submitted by AKFisher : Archaeological reconstruction of the Town Creek, North Carolina mound complex from the mound encyclopedia. The outer walls were palisades, essentially logs stuck vertically into the ground. The walls were then covered with a daub (clay plaster) to make them more fire resistant. Photo courtesy Dr Greg Little, author of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Indian Mounds & Earthwo...

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Rubbish dig casts new light on pre-Columbian village by bat400 on Friday, 21 November 2014
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Tony Boudreaux, an archaeologist who teaches at East Carolina University, along with a student team, was on a job last summer excavating near Town Creek Indian Mound in Montgomery County.

They had just shoveled 2 feet of top soil from a series of 10 foot-by-10 foot squares. Suddenly the soil color changed. The team members abandoned their spades, picked up masons’ trowels and got down on their hands and knees to slowly scrape away slivers of soil.

Right away, this new layer of undisturbed soil gave up its secrets: Dozens of dark, circular stains. The archaeologist and his students realized they were seeing the remains of buildings. The stained soil circles were post holes from long-gone buildings, and from disposal pits.

An ancient person’s trash is an archaeologist’s treasure. Boudreaux and his team found shards of pottery, pressed with designs. A broken stone from an ancient game called “chunkey.” Stone tools. And a tiny, blackened corncob, the remains of someone’s dinner about 800 years ago.

Town Creek Indian Mound site has been excavated countless times, revealing tools, building foundations and human remains. The mound was built, one basketful of earth at a time, sometime around AD 1250 by people whose name for themselves is lost to time. Archaeologists call them the Pee Dee, after the nearby river. Like their mound-building counterparts in other southeastern states during what’s known as the Mississippian Period, the Pee Dee operated in complex societies. But new evidence shows Town Creek isn’t the place scientists once imagined it to be.

“Early on, the interpretation of the site was strictly as a ceremonial center, inhabited by maybe two or three priests year-round,” said Rich Thompson, Town Creek site manager. “Then once a year during … a green corn celebration, people from around would be invited in. Tony’s work has shown there was just way too much activity out there for it to be a cut-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world type of place. It was difficult to break away from that early story because that’s the story it’s been for decades.”

What Boudreaux discovered is that the land at Town Creek State Historic Site has been occupied, on and off, since the Ice Age, and that for a long time, the site wasn’t a set-apart, sacred center – it was a busy, thriving community. Boudreaux’s mapping of the soil stains shows too many buildings for the site to have been mostly vacant. And items like the charred corncob show the site was full of everyday life.
“Early on, when the Mississippian community was first founded, there seemed to be a village of at least 10 houses, maybe more,” Boudreaux said. “There was no mound yet. There were public buildings in the area where the mound would be built.”

In the homes at Town Creek, when people died, they were buried in the floor of the house. But then, after the mound was constructed, something changed.
“Parts of the place appear to become a full-time graveyard,” Boudreaux said. “At least four of these houses were kind of transformed into four cemeteries.” All told, more than 500 people were buried at Town Creek.
As the area filled with the bodies of the dead, the mound appears to have become a place visited on ceremonial occasions.

“Mounds were kind of symbols in a cosmic sense,” Boudreaux said. Mounds “were associated most often with community leaders, and mounds were … like a county seat. That’s the place where the ancestors live, where the chief is on the mound performing ceremonial activities that will help keep the universe spinning.”

Understanding the way the community at Town Creek shifted from active village to a place of ceremony and status with a temple-topped mound will take time and more research, Boudreaux said. There’s much more to excavate, and the newly cleaned artifacts will need to be cataloged. Boudreaux hopes to entice an expert in ancient plant m

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