Aztalan State Park
Lake Mills, Wisconsin
A fortified Mississippian town on the Crawfish River in Wisconsin, with platform mounds and a stockade reconstructed where a Middle Mississippian colony stood nine centuries ago.
Aztalan is the northernmost major outpost of the Mississippian world: a walled town of platform mounds established around 1100 CE by people whose material culture connects them to Cahokia, hundreds of miles south, and abandoned by about 1300. The site's stepped pyramidal mounds, its reconstructed stockade with projecting towers, and its excavated features make it one of the most important archaeological sites in the Upper Midwest, and its name is a mistake with a history: Josiah Snelling misheard the mythical Azatlan and it stuck.
Wisconsin preserved the site as a state park in the early twentieth century, partially reconstructing the stockade and the mounds, and the park presents the archaeology without inventing ceremony. Its inclusion here stands on the same ground as Cahokia: monumental native architecture whose builders left no written record, and whose descendants include the nations of the region today.
Visiting
The Wisconsin DNR's Aztalan page carries hours and the state park vehicle admission; the mounds and stockade line are a short walk from the lot.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Aztalan_State_Park), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories