UA Museum Resumes Excavation of Rare Native American Council House, Determined as Southeast’s Largest

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Renewed excavation efforts at the site of a Native American council house, first discovered by a University of Alabama archaeological team in 2001, have revealed it is the largest such structure ever found in the Southeast, says the UA anthropology professor leading the excavation.

“In floor area, the Moundville earthlodge is just slightly larger than the famous example at Macon, Georgia, making ours the largest known to date in the Southeast,” said Dr. Vernon James Knight, curator of Southeastern Archaeology for UA’s Alabama Museum of Natural History.

“In short, we are very excited about the new information we’ve gathered in recent weeks, which reinforces our first impressions of the size and significance of this unique building in Alabama’s prehistory,” Knight said.

The large, square structure was an earth-covered wooden building, with narrow entrance tunnels bordered by timber walls. The structure’s outside dimensions are 50 feet by 50 feet, and its interior is 38 feet by 38 feet. Recent radiocarbon dating efforts indicate the structure was built in the early 1400s.

The earthlodge, a place where chiefs of the Moundville Indians met with their council to make important decisions, was first uncovered in June 2001 by a Knight-led team excavating at UA’s Moundville Archaeological Park. Initially, only a small portion of the structure was unearthed.

Work at the site resumed in August. A recent visit to the site by Dr. Jay Johnson, of the University of Mississippi, and one of his graduate students, Bryan Haley, and their use of a remote sensing instrument revealed more information about the unexcavated portions of the earthlodge, Knight said.

In addition to helping determine the structure’s overall size, the device, known as a gradiometer, revealed a previously undetected entrance trench on the west side of the building, opposite the entrance trench on the east side that was previously discovered, Knight said.

The device provides the archaeologists with an image of the structure, even though portions of it remain underground. It creates the image by measuring small differences in the earth’s magnetism.

Park visitors are welcome to see the excavation on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-5 p.m., weather permitting. The remaining areas of the park are open daily. Admission to the park is $4 for adults, $2 for seniors, students, and children, and those under 5 are admitted free.

The team, led by Knight, first discovered the structure during the University of Alabama Museum’s annual scientific dig, where professional and academic instructors guide lay people in archaeological techniques. On the surface of a large mound, they unearthed the burned, collapsed remains of the rare structure. Ceramic smoking pipes, decorated pottery fragments, a stone ax head and bits of native copper have been recovered.

“This is a unique and special find,” Knight said at the time of the discovery. “The site was generally abandoned about 1500 when the tribal chiefs split up.”

A few earthlodges have been found in the southern Appalachians and in Georgia, but until the 2001 find, archaeologists did not believe they existed as far west as Alabama’s prehistoric Moundville.

At its peak, in about 1250, Moundville was the largest city north of Mexico, home to about 3,000 people. From A.D. 1000 to 1500, Mississippian Indians constructed large earthworks in Moundville, topped by temples, council houses, and the homes of their nobility. The Moundville Archaeological Park contains more than two dozen of these surviving flat-topped mounds, remnants of a ceremonial and economic center whose trade routes extended across the entire southeastern United States.

The UA park, located on the banks of the Black Warrior River 13 miles south of Tuscaloosa, preserves 320 acres of what was once the largest and most powerful prehistoric Native American community in North America.