Mound A

Mound A is T-shaped, about 72 feet tall, and holds roughly 8.4 million cubic feet of fill, the second-largest earthen mound by volume in eastern North America. Soil studies indicate the vegetation on the spot was burned between about 1450 and 1250 BCE, and that the mound was then raised in a single effort, probably in under three months. Some archaeologists read its plan as a bird and others as an island at the center of the builders' world. The people who built it cannot be tied to any named modern nation.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 0.4 mi
  Louisiana's only World Heritage Site: six C-shaped ridges, a 43-acre plaza and Mound A, raised on Macon Ridge between about 1700 and 1100 BCE.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 17 mi
  A state museum on US 65 north of Lake Providence with a sharecropper's cabin, a commissary and a gin house, in the parish where John H. Scott worked for Black voting rights.
• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 18 mi
  About 1,000 feet of the ditch Union troops dug in early 1863 to get Grant's army around Vicksburg, with a boardwalk, a pier and a visitor center in the Byerley House.
• Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge — 22 mi
  Nearly 80,000 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and oxbow lakes, with the state's largest population of Louisiana black bears and Theodore Roosevelt's 1907 hunt nearby.

More markers nearby

• Mound E — steps away
• Southwest Ridges — 0.2 mi
• Mound C — 0.3 mi
• After Poverty Point — 0.3 mi