Emerald Mound

Emerald Mound is the second-largest Mississippian ceremonial mound in the United States, after Monks Mound at Cahokia: eight acres, 770 feet by 435 feet at the base, 35 feet high, with two smaller mounds on top that bring the whole to about 60 feet. It was shaped around a natural hill and dates to roughly 1250 to 1600. The Park Service notes that the village ceremonial center stood on top of the mound itself, not around a plaza. Early records mention six smaller mounds along its sides, but plowing erased them.

The builders were Plaquemine people of the Natchez Bluffs, and the Natchez, their descendants, were still using the site as a main ceremonial center in the later 1600s. The Park Service notes that the Mississippians did not disappear; they became the tribes of the Southeast, among them the Chickasaw Nation, the Choctaw of Oklahoma and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. The mound first appears in written accounts in 1801 and was long called the Selsertown site; Emerald comes from the plantation that held the land in the 1850s. Excavations ran from 1838 to 1972. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1989.

Tribes associated with the site asked that the public be kept off the top because the mound is sacred, and the Parkway took out the stairs in 2017. So you see it from the ground, from the paved lot and the interpretive display, which is the right scale for it anyway. Turn off the Parkway at milepost 10.3 and follow Emerald Mound Road for almost a mile.