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Moundville Archaeological Site, also known as the Moundville Archaeological Park, is a Mississippian culture site on the Black Warrior River in Hale County, near the city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Extensive archaeological investigation has shown that the site was the political and ceremonial center of a regionally organized Mississippian culture chiefdom polity between the 11th and 16th centuries. The archaeological park portion of the site is administered by the University of Alabama Museums and encompasses , consisting of 29 platform mounds around a rectangular plaza.〔 The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. Moundville is the second-largest site in the United States of the classic Middle Mississippian era, after Cahokia in Illinois. The culture was expressed in villages and chiefdoms throughout the central Mississippi River Valley, the lower Ohio River Valley, and most of the Mid-South area, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi as the core of the classic Mississippian culture area.〔(【引用サイトリンク】work="National Park Service" )〕 The park contains a museum and an archaeological laboratory. Bottle Creek Indian Mounds, located on an island north of Mobile, is another major Mississippian site in Alabama on the Gulf Coast. It has also been designated as an NHL. ==Site== The site was occupied by Native Americans of the Mississippian culture from around 1000 AD to 1450 AD.〔 Around 1150 AD it began its rise from a local to a regional center. At its height, the community took the form of a roughly residential and political area protected on three sides by a bastioned wooden palisade wall, with the remaining side protected by the river bluff.〔 The largest platform mounds are located on the northern edge of the plaza and become increasingly smaller going either clockwise or counter clockwise around the plaza to the south. Scholars theorize that the highest-ranking clans occupied the large northern mounds, with the smaller mounds' supporting buildings used for residences, mortuary, and other purposes. A total of 29 remain on the site.〔 Of the two largest mounds in the group, Mound A occupies a central position in the great plaza, and Mound B lies just to the north, a steep, tall pyramidal mound with two access ramps.〔 Along with both mounds, archaeologists have also found evidence of borrow pits, other public buildings, and a dozen small houses constructed of pole and thatch. Archaeologists have interpreted this community plan as a sociogram, an architectural depiction of a social order based on ranked clans. According to this model, the Moundville community was segmented into a variety of different clan precincts, the ranked position of which was represented in the size and arrangement of paired earthen mounds around the central plaza. By 1300, the site was being used more as a religious and political center than as a residential town.〔 This signaled the beginning of a decline, and by 1500 most of the area was abandoned.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Moundville Archaeological Site」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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