Emerald Mound, the second-largest Mississippian ceremonial earthwork in the United States, once carried eight smaller mounds on its summit, and six of them are gone. In 1801 James Hall described the great earthen platform as 45 feet high, with large mounds at its east and west ends and three smaller ones at regular intervals along each of the long sides, between four and eight feet tall. By the 1830s two of the six side mounds had washed away. When Edward Palmer examined the site for the Bureau of Ethnology in 1884 and 1887, two more had gone, and by 1917 nothing was left of them. Palmer concluded that the builders had reshaped a natural loess hill rather than raising the whole mass by hand.
Erosion had help from more than a century of plowing and from diggers. John Monette cut into the sides in 1838 and found a crust of rubble like slack-baked brick, now read as the clay daub of buildings that stood on the lost mounds. A Dr. Benbrook sank a shaft 42 feet into the platform, and a later dig for Dr. Joseph Jones of New Orleans went 15 or 16 feet into the west mound. In the early 1900s Vincent Perrault of Natchez took five limestone effigy pipes from burials at the foot of the east mound. The platform has lost about ten feet of height, and cotton cropping erased the village that stood south of it.
John Cotter excavated for the National Park Service in 1948, and a 1955 stabilization filled the gullies, straightened the slumped sides, filled a pothunter's pit in the west mound and covered the earthwork in Bermuda grass. No attempt was made to rebuild the six missing mounds. Emerald Mound stands about a mile off the parkway on Emerald Mound Road, reached from milepost 10.3.
Getting there
31.6361, -91.2472
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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