Kings Crossing Site

Kings Crossing Site

A digital painting showing what the Kings Crossing Site may have looked like at its peak. Artist Herb Roe
Kings Crossing Site
Location within Mississippi today
Coordinates:
Location
Country:  USA
Region: Warren County, Mississippi
Nearest town: Vicksburg, Mississippi
History
Culture: Coles Creek culture
First occupied: 900 CE
Period: Kings Crossing Phase
Abandoned: 1050
Excavation and maintenance
Responsible body: private
Notable archaeologists: Clarence B. Moore
Architecture

Kings Crossing Site is an archaeological site that is a type site for the Kings Crossing Phase (950-1050 CE) of the Lower Yazoo Basin Coles Creek chronology.

Contents

Location

The site is located four miles north of the center of Vicksburg, between Chickasaw Bayou and the Illinois Central railroad tracks.

Site importance

Clarence B. Moore, who visited the site in 1908, described Mound A as being 25 feet (7.6 m) tall, although by the 1950s it had been significantly shortened. Mound B has been almost completely leveled, although a small rise can be discerned. Mound C is roughly 12 feet (3.7 m) tall. Mounds A and C are both roughly 120 feet (37 m) sq. Pottery sampling in the 1950s from Mound A gave the site a historical importance out of all proportion to its size. Test pits from a 1949 excavation of the Holly Bluff Site produced an important glimpse of a late "transitional" Coles Creek to Plaquemine assemblage featuring thin tapered rims of polished plain ware and carefully executed varieties of Coles Creek incised and associated types. Although intriguing as pottery, it was not sufficiently integrated strategraphically to postulate a distinct phase. Site sampling from the Kings Crossing Site in 1954 supplied the integration and gave the phase a name. Since then, especially in the Tensas Basin, it has become one of the firmest and most easily identifiable ceramic complexes in the Lower Mississippi area.[1]

In 2005 the Kings Crossing Site was portrayed on the Vicksburg Floodwall Mural project to represent the American Indian heritage of the region.[2]

See also

References

  1. ^ Phillips, Philip (1970). "Archaeological Survey in the Lower Yazoo Basin, Mississippi, 1949-1955". Peabody Museum. pp. 435. 
  2. ^ http://www.riverfrontmurals.com/indian.htm

External links