Yazoo Mounds
Lake George Site (22YZ557) · Yazoo Basin Plaquemine-Mississippian Center
Plaquemine–Mississippian (700–1500 CE)·Plaquemine-Mississippian (Yazoo Basin)·🇺🇸 Mississippi, Yazoo County, United States
About
About Yazoo Mounds
Major Yazoo Basin Plaquemine-Mississippian mound center at Lake George (c.700–1500 CE), with 20+ mounds (Mound A Plaza 8 m high, 80 m base) arranged around plazas, bastioned embankment, and ditch encircling 55 ha town. Excavated by Clarence B. Moore and by Philip Phillips, James Ford and James Griffin; defines Yazoo Basin sequence Coles Creek → Plaquemine → Mississippian with Winterville comparison. Terminal Mississippian civic center with Addis, Barton Incised ceramics, wall-trench houses and large borrow pits; predecessor to protohistoric Choctaw.
Why it mattersKey sequence type-site for Yazoo Basin chronology; illuminates Coles Creek to Plaquemine to Mississippian transition and Choctaw origins.
Open questions
Mysteries & theories
Mysteries
- 01Function of bastioned embankment — fortification vs cosmogram vs flood control
- 02Relation to Winterville 60 km north — contemporaneous rivals
Theories
- 01Yazoo polities cycled between Winterville and Lake George hegemony, cycling collapse 1500
Theories are interpretations, not findings. The seal above tells you how much scholarly weight the place carries.
History
How it came to be
- Built
- c.700–1500 CE (Coles Creek to Plaquemine–Mississippian)
- Period
- Plaquemine–Mississippian (700–1500 CE)
- Culture
- Plaquemine-Mississippian (Yazoo Basin)
- Builders
- Plaquemine-Mississippian (Coles Creek descendants)
- Purpose
- Plaza town with bastioned enclosure, chiefly residence and mortuary ceremonsial
- Abandoned
- c.1500 CE
- Rediscovered
- Moore 1908; Phillips excavations 1940s
- Excavation
- Partially excavated
On the ground
Structures & features
32.8931° N · 90.7855° W · 32 m · 2 mapped features
Mound A (principal platform)
mound8 m high 80 m base platform on north plaza, summit elite compound
32.8935° N · 90.7850° WBastioned embankment and ditch
earthwork700 m bastioned enclosure encircling plaza-mound plaza with borrow ditch
32.8925° N · 90.7860° W
Gallery