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Culture Periods Represented: Mississippian
The Nashville Mound stood in the area where the Bicentennial Mall is located. It was a Mississippian period platform mound that was about 10 feet high and 30 feet across at the base. Early accounts say stone-box graves surrounded the pyramid-shaped mound. This burial ground stretched all the way to the river, about 6 blocks away ( these burials met the same fate as those in the Noel Cemetery ).
Construction of a platform mound was a community project, with most of a town's people sharing the work. Before building a mound, the town's religious leader held special ceremonies at the site. The ground was prepared by smoothing it out and spreading a layer of clay over it. A fire built on top of it hardened the clay. Then the townspeople took turns dumping baskets full of earth at the site, one by one. As the pile of earth grew they shaped it into a four-sided pyramid. When the height of the mound reached certain levels, a sacred fire was built on top of it and religious ceremonies conducted before the construction continued.
When the mound was finished a council house was usually built on top of it. This building was a combined temple and town hall where religious ceremonies and political meetings were held. It also served as the house of the town's leader. A ramp with clay or log steps reached from the ground to the level top of the mound. The sides were too steep to climb.
Platform Mound Construction
Platform mounds were often built in stages. At certain times, maybe when the town's leader died, the council house was burned down and more earth was added to the original mound. Then a new council house was built on top of this added earth. Over the years, this cycle of rebuilding could dramatically increase the height of the mound.
Calling this site "The" Nasville Mound may be a little misleading. There were many platform and burial mounds within Nashville's city limits. Some were probably visible from this location. Other mound sites only a few miles away surrounded the Nashville Mound: Traveler's Rest and the Ganier site (described elsewhere in this guide), the East Nashville site just across the river, Centennial Park, McCabe Park, the Brick Church Pike site, and others.
This site might have been part of a religious complex occupied only during certain periods, while the people lived in the surrounding villages most of the time. Other Mississippian sites followed this pattern. Archaeologists believe that Mound Bottom, a large mound site about 15 miles from Nashville, was used this way. Several villages probably worked together to build these ceremonial centers. We'll probably never know if this was the case for the Nashville Mound or the mounds near it. They were destroyed before they could be seriously studied.
Platform Mound At Mound Bottom
(Click for larger image)
Around 1710 a French trader built a trading
post on the Nashville Mound to trade with the Shawnee who lived in the area at
that time. A historical marker near the intersection of Jefferson Street and
5th Avenue commemorates the trading post, but it doesn't mention the mound or
the Shawnee.
In 1821 the Nashville Mound was "excavated." Workers started at the top of the mound and dug a hole straight down through the center. They found many pieces of broken pottery, charcoal, a triangular flint arrowhead, and bones and teeth from carnivorous animals. They also found other bones, but couldn't tell if they were human.
Platform Mound at Fewkes Site in Brentwood, Tennessee
(Click for larger image)
Our knowledge and understanding of the mounds has an interesting history. As the United States occupied Indian lands east of the Mississippi during the nineteenth century, thousands of these types of mounds were found, from the Great Lakes area all the way down to Florida. The large numbers and huge size of many (Cahokia Mound in Illinois is 100 feet high and covers 14 acres of land) led some people to believe that Indians could not have built them. Native Americans were thought to be incapable of forming the complex social and political organizations necessary for such large-scale construction projects. Some leading scholars seriously believed that a lost race of people that they called the "Mound Builders" built the mounds and were later driven to extinction by the "invading" Indian tribes.
Platform Mound Near Lebanon, Tennessee
(Click for larger image)
By the late nineteeth century, archaelogists had scientifically proved beyond a doubt that the mounds had been built by Native Americans. But the old non-Indian "Mound Builders" are resurrected sometimes in modern myths about Atlantis or UFO's.
Nashville
Mound Site Map
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