Moundville's 320-acre plaza and Peebles' three-tier social hierarchy

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Key facts

• Moundville, south of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is the largest surviving Mississippian pyramid city in the state and second in size only to Cahokia.
• Its central plaza covered about 320 acres and was ringed by 29 earthen pyramids; Mound B was the largest at 60 ft tall over 2 acres, with Mound A standing in the middle of the plaza.
• A palisade wall over a mile long and 10-12 ft high enclosed three sides, the fourth being the Black Warrior River; about 1,000 people lived inside the walls, but outlying villages and farmsteads brought the community to over 10,000.
• Moundville began as a Late Woodlands village between 800 and 900 CE; Cahokia-type artifacts, two new pyramid mounds and smaller trench-walled, clay-plastered houses with grass thatch roofs appear by 1100.
• Around 1200 houses were burned to clear space for the grand plaza, more than 20 new pyramids were built and a mile-long palisade was erected, so the layout came to resemble Cahokia.
• Population declined after about 1300 and the site was abandoned by the late 1300s, though people returned to bury the dead in abandoned house foundations until about the mid-1400s.
• The rattlesnake disk, a stone disk about 12 inches in diameter carved with two intertwined rattlesnakes ringing a hand with an eye in its palm, was dug up by local farmers in the 1860s; an 1866 claim by sheriff Hezekiah Powell of a 9-foot-tall skeleton sold to the Smithsonian is considered possibly a scam.
• Clarence Moore excavated about 850 sites between 1891 and 1918 and spent 35 days at Moundville in 1905; pot hunters then dug the site until the University of Alabama bought the property in 1933.
• A 1934-1938 Civilian Conservation Corps excavation under Walter Jones and David DeJarnette dug 75 houses and 2,050 burials and recovered tens of thousands of artifacts.
• Christopher Peebles reanalyzed more than 2,000 burials in the 1970s without new fieldwork, arguing for a three-tier ranked society: a large commoner class, an elite class buried in the central plaza mounds, and a chiefly class whose seven burials in Mounds C and D carried more copper artifacts than elite burials.
• Decapitated skeletons in Mound C near elite graves are generally interpreted as sacrifices honoring a chief; Peebles also showed the mounds were paired, a flat-topped platform for elite residences beside a burial mound for the same family, matching contact-period descriptions of southeastern settlements.
• In 1540 de Soto met King Tuscaloosa, who greeted the Spanish from the top of a pyramid mound; at the Battle of Mabila the king's trap was sprung, the city burned and the king was never found, and the Alabama city of Tuscaloosa was named for him. Moundville was abandoned nearly two centuries earlier, so it was not his capital.

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