MOUNDVILLE, Ala. — Eight hundred years ago, the largest population center in the Southeast — the Atlanta of its time — was an Indian village on a bluff overlooking a muddy bend in the Black Warrior River.

Moundville, as the site became known, wasn't big by our standards. Perhaps 3,000 people lived there, with twice that many close by along the river valley, giving the area a total population no larger than present-day Covington. But archaeologists believe those numbers dwarf any other settlement in the Southeast during the centuries before Columbus "discovered" America.

Courtesy of Moundville Archaeological Park (ENLARGE)
Noel Grayson, an Oklahoma Cherokee, shows how to make arrow points to a visitor at Moundville Archaeological Park's annual Native American Festival in Alabama. This year's festival, Oct. 6-9, will feature a living history camp and dance and music performances as well as demonstrations of basket-weaving, pottery, beads, textiles, and bow and arrow making.
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IF YOU GO Getting there • Moundville is a four-hour, 225-mile drive from downtown Atlanta. Take I-20 west to Birmingham and continue to Tuscaloosa. Exit south on Ala. 69, and drive 15 miles to the park. Information • Moundville will hold its annual Native American Festival on Oct. 6-9. 205-371-2234. Web site. About Georgia mounds Georgia's Indian mounds provide evidence of the same pre-Columbian history as Moundville. • Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site, a state park in Cartersville, has produced some of the finest examples of native crafts found anywhere. 770-387-3747. Web site. • Ocmulgee National Monument, a federal site in Macon, has a fine museum and a rebuilt earth lodge, a hollow mound that allows visitors to enter and imagine the days when as many as 50 Indians gathered inside for tribal rites and meetings. 478-752-8257. Web site.

They don't call it Moundville for nothing. There are 26 mounds arranged in a horseshoe around the 317-acre Moundville Archaeological Park — four times as many as at the Etowah Mounds in Cartersville, three times as many as at the Ocmulgee Mounds in Macon.

Climbing the steps up the largest mound and looking over the vista, you can understand why Europeans were so awed and mystified when they found the eastern part of the continent dotted with man-made hills, silent and abandoned, each constructed over centuries, a basket full of soil at a time. The newcomers theorized that these New World pyramids must have been the work of a stray civilization from the Old World, perhaps a lost tribe of Israel.

'Well-kept secret'

The naturalist William Bartram, who saw many mounds during his travels in the late 1700s, took a more scientific view. He thought they were artifacts of an unknown aboriginal people, "the wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients in this part of America."

Moundville is one of the most significant Native American archaeological sites in the nation, yet many people, even in the Southeast, have never heard of it. "We're a well-kept secret," says Betsy Gilbert, the park's education director.

Every autumn, Moundville raises its profile with a Native American Festival that draws 20,000 schoolchildren and others. This year's festival, on Oct. 6-9, will feature a living history camp and performances of native dance and music. There will be demonstrations of basket-weaving, pottery, beads, textiles, and bow and arrow making. Most of the craftwork is done by members of the tribes thought to have descended from the inhabitants of Moundville — Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws.

A puzzling artifact

But no one can say for certain who lived at Moundville. Archaeological evidence suggests the village thrived from A.D. 1000 to 1200 and then declined and was abandoned by 1450. When European explorers showed up a century later, Indians could tell them little about the place.

The mounds of Moundville, some of them as tall as 60 feet, are flat-topped and covered in grass and sometimes trees. Archaeologists call them platform mounds because they were used as foundations for temples, meeting houses and other community buildings long since vanished. Chieftains lived atop some of them, their followers dwelling below in more modest structures made of timber, mud and thatch. Few of the mounds were used for burials, as some people imagine all Indian mounds were.

Most of what we know about Moundville comes from the thousands of objects excavated from the site over the past century. Some of the choicest finds are displayed in the Jones Archaeological Museum, an attractive Depression-era building named for Walter B. Jones, the state geologist who directed extensive digs at the site during the 1930s.

The museum displays fragments of jewelry, pottery, pipes, implements and other pieces of everyday life. Judging from the objects, Moundville's residents grew a lot of corn and traded goods in a surprisingly wide area. Some of the artifacts contain copper from the Great Lakes, greenstone from the Appalachians and shells from the Gulf Coast.

Moundville's most famous object is the "rattlesnake disc," a 12 1/2 -inch-wide piece of stone carved with the image of a human hand, an open eye peering from the palm, with two snakes coiled on both sides. It's the best example of a puzzling motif that has turned up on artifacts around Moundville.

What does it mean? Based on Indian legends, scholars think it's a funeral image, with the eye representing a portal into the afterlife, symbolized by the hand of the Creator.

"Moundville seems to have been a place where a lot of people wanted to be buried," says park director Bill Bomar, pointing out that 2,000 burials were excavated on the site before the disturbance of native bones fell out of fashion.

In fact, one wing of the museum was built over a burial ground containing more than three dozen sets of remains. For years, visitors could look down through the floor and see open, occupied graves.

As sensibilities and laws changed in the late 1980s, that macabre wing of the museum was closed. Bomar says the contents of the graves were removed to the nearby University of Alabama, which administers Moundville. There the bones remain, undisplayed, a vestige of the final chapter of the Southeast's prehistoric past.