Foster's Mound (
22 AD 503) is a
Plaquemine culture archaeological site located in
Adams County, Mississippi
Adams County is a county located in the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census, the population was 29,538. The county seat is Natchez.
The county is the first to have been organized in the former Mississippi Territory. It is named ...
northeast of
Natchez off
US 61. It is the
type site for the ''Foster Phase (1350-1500 CE)'' of the Natchez Bluffs Plaquemine culture chronology. It was added to the
NRHP
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...
on September 2, 1982 as NRIS number 82003091.
The mounds are listed on the
Mississippi Mound Trail.
Description
The Foster's site has two
platform mounds and is located on the northern bank of
St. Catherine Creek near its confluence with the
Mississippi River. The largest mound, Mound A, is in height and by at its base and has had a plantation house on its summit since the 1790s. Its dimensions were originally smaller but it was enlarged to accommodate the veranda of the plantation house. Mound B is to the south across a large
plaza area. It is an amorphous blob about at its highest point. It has been seriously eroded by the creek and is barely recognizable as a rectangular platform mound. The site sat at a major crossroads in Precolumbian times, because of its location on the original route of the
Natchez Trace
The Natchez Trace, also known as the Old Natchez Trace, is a historic forest trail within the United States which extends roughly from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, linking the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers. ...
, directly connected to
Emerald Mound
The Emerald Mound site ( 22 AD 504), also known as the '' Selsertown site'', is a Plaquemine culture Mississippian period archaeological site located on the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton, Mississippi, United States. The site dates from the ...
to the northeast and the Grand Village of the Natchez to the southwest, and its proximity to the Mississippi River. The site was excavated in 1971-72 by Jeffrey P. Brain as part of the Lower Mississippi Survey for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University. Mississippian culture pottery, Pottery recovered from beneath the mounds was found to be ''proto-Natchez people, Natchezan'' and was instrumental in defining the protohistoric ''Foster Phase (1350 to 1500 CE)'' of the Plaquemine culture chronology.
References
External links
UM Museum of Anthropology
Natchez
Plaquemine Mississippian culture
Mounds in Mississippi
Geography of Adams County, Mississippi
Natchez Trace
National Register of Historic Places in Adams County, Mississippi
Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Mississippi
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