Etowah Indian Mounds

A 54-acre site on the bank of the Etowah River, settled between roughly 1000 and 1550 AD by the Mississippian culture and now one of the best-preserved pre-Columbian Native American complexes east of the Mississippi. Six platform mounds — earthworks built up by hand over generations — survive, the largest rising 19 metres above the surrounding plain. A defensive ditch and palisade once enclosed the town of perhaps several thousand inhabitants.

The on-site museum is small but unusually rich, with the celebrated marble figurines excavated from one of the mounds, copper plates, shell gorgets, and pottery. You can climb to the top of Mound A on a wooden staircase for the long view over the Etowah valley. Allow two hours including the museum.

things to do sight museum
A story
Mound A, the largest at the site, is 19 metres high and was once topped by a thatched temple. Excavations in the 1950s found a pair of carved marble figures inside one of the smaller mounds — a seated man and woman, almost certainly ancestor effigies — that are now among the best-preserved pieces of Mississippian sculpture anywhere. They sit in the on-site museum.