Mangum Mound, on the south side of the Natchez Trace Parkway at milepost 45.7 across from Grindstone Ford, is a burial ground built on a natural knoll by people of the Plaquemine culture. Archaeologists date its use to the Foster phase, roughly 1350 to 1500, and believe it was abandoned before the expedition of Hernando de Soto in 1540. The National Park Service treats it as a sacred site for today's American Indian tribes, and a 2004 report for the park placed it near the border of the traditional lands of the Natchez and Choctaw nations. Cultivation has rounded its edges and softened its outline. The farmer who owned the land, Spurgeon C. Mangum, dug into the mound in 1936 and found human remains, Plaquemine pottery, chunkey stones and three fragments of a hammered copper plate bearing a bird design.
Test excavations in April 1951, part of the Natchez Trace Park Survey, found twelve extended burials. In 1963 the archaeologist Charles F. Bohannon excavated the mound for the Park Service and recovered the remains of eighty-four people, more than half of them bundle burials of gathered and reburied bones, which he took to be older burials moved to make room for new ones. A second copper plate was found.
The park's older sign said the burials showed high infant mortality and that when a chief died his retainers were killed and buried with him, a practice it called a brutal ritual. In consultations reported in 2004, the tribes taking part asked that the word brutal be dropped, and asked unanimously that the paved walk to the top of the mound be removed, since walking on it is inconsistent with its sacred nature.
Getting there
31.9923, -90.8994
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