Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site

Etowah was a Mississippian town of several thousand people between about 1000 and 1550 CE, laid out with six flat-topped mounds, a plaza, a moat-like defensive ditch, and a village stretching along the Etowah River. The 63-foot great mound carried the home of the priest-chief above the town, and burials in other mounds produced some of the most celebrated objects in eastern North American archaeology: embossed copper plates of dancers and birdmen, marble statues, and engraved shell gorgets. The state of Georgia describes Etowah as the most intact Mississippian culture site in the Southeast, and a nature trail follows the river past the remains of a v-shaped fish trap.

The site is in the middle of a significant change. Under NAGPRA, Georgia has begun returning Etowah's ancestors and burial objects to the tribes they belong to, over 400 sets of human remains and more than 187,000 funerary objects by news counts, and the museum built to display those collections is being reworked around that transfer, in cooperation with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and other descendant communities. What a visitor sees now is a landscape first: mounds rising over the river, ditches and plaza marked out, and a museum in transition. The repatriation belongs front and center in any account, because it is the site's live story, not a footnote.

Visiting

Georgia DNR operates the site at 813 Indian Mounds Road, Cartersville, Georgia; (770) 387-3747. Open 9 am to 5 pm daily; $6 adult / $4.50 senior / $4 youth 6-17 / $2 under 6. The museum is in renovation during the repatriation process, so check the DNR notice or call before planning a museum visit.

Photo: JJonahJackalope, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Etowah_Mounds%2C_Mounds_A_and_B.jpg))