Carson Mounds

About this property

The Carson Mounds (22 CO 505), also known as the Carson Site and Carson-Montgomery- is a large Mississippian culture archaeological site located near Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi, United States, in the Yazoo Basin. Only a few large earthen mounds are still present at Carson to this day. Archaeologists have suggested that Carson is one of the more important archaeological sites in the state of Mississippi. Radiocarbon dating has shown the site was occupied as early as 1040 CE with the large earthen monuments and villages being constructed at the site after 1200 CE, and significant occupation spanning 1420 to 1660 CE. Archaeologists suggest that Carson is important because it was either near or part of one of the indigenous polities encountered by the expedition of Hernando de Soto, the earliest European explorers of the southeastern United States in the early 1540s. There is no physical evidence that Carson was visited by de Soto or his men during their westward trek. However, they did pass at the very least within 50 kilometres (31 mi) – 75 kilometres (47 mi) of Carson when they traveled down the Mississippi River in July 1543. Some archaeologists and historians have located the polity of Quizquiz encountered by de Soto in the general location of the Carson site and its neighbors and the polity of Quigualtam being centered further downstream at the Emerald Phase (1500–1680) of the protohistoric Natchez chiefdom in the Natchez Bluffs region. Others have suggested a more northerly location for Quizquiz at the Walls phase sites near Memphis, Tennessee. Along with the introduction of Eurasian diseases, the social disruptions caused by de Soto and his men caused native polities to fragment and fall apart. No further European contact with the area happened until the late 1600s when French missionaries and explorers entered the region both downriver from Canada and upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, by which time the paramount chiefdoms recorded by de Soto had vanished. Carson was first visited by early scientific explorers and archaeologists in the late nineteenth century, including surveyors for the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, Col. Philetus W. Norris and William Henry Holmes. The site was located on the Oasis Plantation owned by the Carson family and a map of the landscape and mounds was published in 1894 in the 12th Annual Report to the Bureau of American Ethnology by Cyrus Thomas. Subsequent researchers to visit the site include the Harvard LMS survey, Ian Brown, Jay K. Johnson, John Connaway, and Jayur Madhusudan Mehta. This map, in addition to research by archaeologists, established the significant scale of settlement at the site. The mounds stretch across an expanse of land over 1.6 kilometres (0.99 mi) in length. In the greater pantheon of Mississippian culture sites, Carson is quite large, and it was incredibly important in local and regional political dynamics.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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