Wickliffe Mounds
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Wickliffe Mounds is a Mississippian culture archaeological site located in Ballard County, Kentucky, just outside the town of Wickliffe, Kentucky, about three miles from the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
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[edit] The Community at Wickliffe Mounds
The town at Wickliffe Mounds was both a ceremonial and administrative center of an important chiefdom in the Mississippian culture. At its peak it had a population probably reaching into the hundreds.
It was apparently inhabited between 1000 CE and 1300 CE. The site is dominated by two large platform mounds, with at least eight smaller mounds scattered around the area around a central plaza area. Their agriculture was based on corn as a staple, and they had trade with societies as far away as North Carolina, Wisconsin, and the Gulf of Mexico. As most other Mississippian chiefdoms, the community of Wickliffe had a social hierarchy ruled by a hereditary chief.
[edit] Exploitation and Excavation
Amateur and semi-professional excavations first began in the site around 1913, and continued sporadically for several decades. In 1930, Fain W. King, a businessman from Paducah, Kentucky, began private excavations of the site in earnest, with the intention of turning the site into a tourist attraction. In cooperation with his wife, Blanche Busey King, they opened the site as a tourist attraction under the name "Ancient Buried City". Their venture was highly controversial because they used sensational and misleading advertising, altered the site in some ways to make it more visually appealing, and had very dubious and exaggerated interpretations of the site, acts which put them directly in opposition to professional archaeologists that had examined the site. They deeded the site to Western Baptist Hospital in Paducah upon their death in 1946, which continued to operate the site as a tourism business until 1983. In that year, the site was donated to Murray State University, which used it to conduct research and to train students. In 1984 the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2004, the site became the 11th State Historical Site of Kentucky and entered the control of the State Parks Service.
[edit] External links
[edit] Books
Kleber, John J. et al. (1992). The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press. ISBN 0-8131-1772-0.
