Shiloh Indian Mounds Site

About this property

Shiloh Indian Mounds Site (40HR7) is an archaeological site of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture (a regional variation of the Mississippian culture). It is located beside the Tennessee River on the grounds of the Shiloh National Military Park, in Hardin County of southwestern Tennessee. A National Historic Landmark, it is one of the largest Woodland era sites in the southeastern United States. The site was inhabited starting around 1000 CE by a Late Woodland culture indigenous peoples, and then later by those of an Early Mississippian culture, until it was abandoned in approximately 1350 CE. The Shiloh Indian National Historic Landmark is situated on a high bluff, between two ravines, overlooking the Tennessee River at the edge of the Shiloh Plateau. The village was encircled by a wooden palisade, while the village itself consisted of more than 100 wattle and daub houses, over three dozen individual house mounds, and eight mounds. Seven of the mounds were substructure platform mounds and the seventh was a Woodland period conical burial mound. It was the largest site in the region and probably functioned as the center of a country that occupied 20 miles (32 km) stretch of the Tennessee River Valley. The chiefdom held sway over six smaller villages, each with a mound or two, and many scattered farmsteads up and down the valley. The southernmost mound served as a burial place for leaders and other important people. This mound was oval shaped with a round top. A map of the site can be found on the Shiloh Indian Mounds website. The people of Shiloh Mounds were intensely involved in maize agriculture, as well as other food crops originating in the Americas, such as squash, sunflowers, goosefoot, marshelder, and maygrass. They also gathered wild foodstuffs such as acorns and hickory nuts. The hunting of whitetail deer, squirrel, rabbit, turkey, and raccoon as well as fishing were also important. In addition to the Shiloh site, the chiefdom included six smaller towns (each with one or two mounds such as the Swallow Bluff Island Mounds site), and isolated farmsteads scattered on higher ground in the river valley. Downstream on the river's eastern bank, at the present location of Savannah, Tennessee, was another palisaded multiple mound settlement, although it is still unclear if the sites were occupied at the same time. Other neighbors had communities all along the Tennessee and Tombigbee Rivers, with sites in Alabama, Mississippi, and western Tennessee. Archaeologists think the presence of prestige goods from the Cahokia site in Illinois means the people of Shiloh Mounds were more closely tied politically to that area than to chiefdoms in the Middle Tennessee area.

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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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