Bear Creek Mound

Bear Creek Mound, at milepost 308.8 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Tishomingo County, is a flat-topped temple mound that the National Park Service excavated in 1965 and then rebuilt with a bulldozer. A Park Service survey recorded it in 1950 as about 12 feet high, a figure later judged to be only an estimate, but plowing had cut it to a low rise about 4 feet high by the time the archeologist Charles Bohannon began digging it. He considered recommending that the site be dropped. He kept it instead as the only known Mississippian mound at the northern end of the parkway, trenched its flanks to find the original edge, staked the sides and had the plowed soil pushed back on top. He wrote that the rebuilt perimeter is accurate but that the slope and height are estimates; the mound was rebuilt 8 to 10 feet high.

His trenches showed a mound roughly square, 85 to 90 feet on a side, raised in four stages, the first a low platform about 30 feet square capped with red clay. Burned daub on the final stage points to a house or temple on the summit, and burials with pottery vessels had been made in it. The village beside it yielded two houses, pits, four burials, charred corncobs and the bones of opossum, beaver, raccoon, black bear, turkey, box turtle and garfish.

The National Register nomination, listed in 1988, dates the mound and village to about 1400–1600 and ties them to the Kogers Island phase of the Tennessee Valley. Points from the plowed soil are far older, among them a Cumberland fluted point made before 8000 BC. The same summer Bohannon tested Cave Spring, a sinkhole with rock shelters about half a mile west, and found only a handful of flakes and two unfinished dart points.