Chucalissa Indian

The de Soto link is a tentative guess, not a finding. The Walls phase town here, occupied from about 1000 to 1550 CE, may be the Province of Quizquiz that the expedition met on the Mississippi, but there is no evidence the Spaniards visited Chucalissa itself, which was probably abandoned by the early 1540s. The name is Chickasaw for abandoned house. Civilian Conservation Corps workers found artifacts in 1938, and digging continued for forty years. The site became a National Historic Landmark in 1994, and the University of Memphis has run it since 1962.

What the plaque says

Chucalissa Indian The site of an ancient ceremonial center which flourished from 1000-1600 A. D. It may have been one of the towns visited by DeSoto when he first saw the Mississippi River in 1854. It was part of a highly developed agricultural province which DeSoto called Quiz Quiz and the place where he built boats with which to cross the Mississippi River.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — steps away
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.
• Graceland — 6.0 mi
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 6.4 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 6.5 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.

More markers nearby

• Ernest C. Withers House — 2.8 mi
• Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church — 2.9 mi
• Fort Assumption — 5.4 mi
• Fort Pickering — 5.4 mi