Shiloh Indian Mounds

Long before the church or the landing, a town stood on this high bluff over the Tennessee River, between two steep ravines. A wooden palisade enclosed seven earthen mounds and dozens of houses. Six of the mounds are rectangular with flat tops and probably carried the town's important buildings, which may have included a council house and the homes of its leaders. One mound was used for the burial of leaders and other important people, and that is reason enough to walk the whole site with the quiet you would keep in a graveyard.

The town was the center of a society, called a chiefdom, that held about 20 miles of the river valley. Its chief was both political and religious leader, with a council of elders. Its people farmed corn, squash and sunflowers and also ate deer, fish, hickory nuts and acorns. They traded with Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis. A stone pipe carved as a kneeling man, found here in 1899 and made of the same red stone and in the same style as figures from Cahokia, is now in the Tennessee River Museum in Savannah. The people left this part of the valley in the 1200s or 1300s, centuries before written records, so the Park Service says it is not clear how they were related to the later Choctaw, Chickasaw or Creek.

The mounds were included in the military park early and never plowed, so the collapsed clay walls of the houses still show on the surface as low rings. Few places in the eastern United States offer that.