Boyd Mounds

Boyd Mounds, at milepost 106.9 of the Natchez Trace Parkway near Ridgeland, was the site of six small burial mounds and a village occupied from about AD 750 to 1250. The National Park Service archeologist Charles Bohannon excavated the site in 1963 and 1964. Plowing had cut three of the mounds to rises only 1.5 to 2.5 feet high, and he dug the other three completely. One of them, Mound 2, looked at first like a single earthwork about 100 feet long; inside were two separate burial mounds, 35 and 20 feet across, later covered by one continuous mantle of earth, the history the Park Service tells at the overlook. Its 41 burials were laid in shallow graves or on the ground and covered over, none with grave goods.

Mound 4 held 26 burials in two stages, with a break of some years between them. Only 4 percent of the pottery in the first stage was shell-tempered, against 21 percent in the second, the shift that marks the change from the Woodland to the Mississippian period. Seven of its burials had offerings of shell beads, pottery vessels and stone celts, and one, with historic-period glass beads, was a much later Choctaw burial. In the village area he dug, Bohannon found one round house about 50 feet across, its wall posts set in a trench.

Bohannon described the Boyd people as living in a cultural backwater: they took up shell-tempered pottery but never the temple mounds of the Mississippian towns, building conical burial mounds instead. A 1989 revision of the National Register nomination argued that the mounds and village were in use at the same time. The Park Service calls the mound sacred to the Choctaw and other tribal nations.