Transylvania Mounds

Archaeologists use Transylvania as the type site for the Transylvania Phase, dated 1500 to 1680 CE in the Tensas Basin's Plaquemine Mississippian sequence. The settlement began in the Coles Creek period, around 700 to 1200 CE, and radiocarbon samples tested in the 1960s fall between 1048 and 1411 CE. The tallest mound is about 34 feet and was flanked by two plazas; mapping in 2000 found six mounds still standing out of as many as twelve, farming having leveled the rest. A barn stands on one of the lower ones. The site is private land, seen from the highway.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grant's Canal, Lake Providence — 8.4 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.
• Louisiana State Cotton Museum — 9.2 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.
• Poverty Point World Heritage Site — 12 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.

More markers nearby

• Julice Mound — 0.9 mi
• Parish of Carroll — 8.3 mi
• Grant's Canal — 8.4 mi
• Battle for the Mississippi: The Vicksburg Campaign — 8.5 mi