YAZOO COUNTY, Miss. ( WJTV ) – There are those places, not just in Mississippi but everywhere, that you can drive right past and not think about them and miss something.
This little area the other side of the road from Lake George in Yazoo County is a good example. There are remains of a prehistoric moat. The moat surrounds one of the largest surviving Indian Mound sites in Mississippi: The Lake George Mounds.
People started living in this area way back about 1500 BC. But it was more than 2,000 years later – about 800 AD – that the mound builders hit on this place and ended up constructing about 28 mounds. Some were burial mounds, and some of the smaller mounds have been used as modern home sites.
Focused on Mississippi: Cultural landscape of the Delta
There is a central mound at this site, which is 55-feet tall. Winter is the best time to see it when the leaves are off of the trees. This mound says a lot about the culture of the people who built it. They must have been very organized and efficient to free up enough people from the necessity of gathering food and building shelter for enough time to build this mound. One basket of dirt at a time dug with muscle shell tools. I can’t even find time to clean out my garage, much less join in a community mound build.