Wilcox County's Matthews Landing Mounds, Dale Site described in Alabama Indian mound book

Last week in this space I wrote about a great book called “Native American Mounds In Alabama: An Illustrated Guide to Public Sites.” This 68-page book, published in 2017 by Archetype Books in Memphis, was written by Dr. Gregory L. Little. This book contains a wealth of information about Indian mounds, artifacts, standing stones, stone memorials, caves, stone effigies, shell heaps and other archaeological sites throughout Alabama, including Wilcox County.

In last week’s paper, I talked about how the book contains information on two Wilcox County sites, the “Furman Site” and the “Liddell Site.” Not long after the paper came out, it was brought to my attention that the book also contains information on two other sites in Wilcox County. These sites are known as the Matthews Landing Mounds and the Dale Site.

The Matthews Landing site consists of two mounds and a village area located on private property about nine miles west of Camden, near the Alabama River at Possum Bend. According to Little, these mounds have been called the “best-preserved and most important Mississippian mound site for nearly 100 miles along the Alabama River.” The two mounds were once large with multiple tiers, however, erosion from excavations, floods and cultivation have spread them out and greatly reduced their height, Little said.

Little notes that the Matthews Landing site actually had three mounds, but the third mound is about a quarter of a mile away and is known as the Dale Site. C.B. Moore excavated the mounds in 1899, finding several burial urns associated with 30 burials. C.B. Moore was Clarence Bloomfield Moore of Philadelphia, an archaeologist who studied and excavated Indian sites throughout the Southeast before his death in 1936.

The large mound at the Dale Site was described by Moore as a “truncated pyramid.” The mound complex was not rediscovered until 1980, Little said. Not far from here is the Furman Site.

As discussed last week, the Furman Site was a small Mississippian era village with two low platform mounds on the east side of the Alabama River, about eight miles west of Camden. This site, which was excavated by Moore, consists of a platform mound that was utilized over a long time period for intrusive burials. Intrusive burials were burials that occurred at sites with much earlier, pre-existing burials.

For readers who missed last week, the Liddell Archaeological Site is on private property near Camden. This ancient village, another Mississippian site, was occupied as early as 9,000 B.C. To put this into perspective, this was about 6,500 years before the pyramids were built in Egypt.

The Liddell Site has yielded up several burial urns and some researchers believe that this site was close to the famous walled village of Maubila. Many of you will remember from school that Maubila was where Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto fought Chief Tuscaloosa in 1540. According to Little’s book, excavations at the Liddell Site have also shown that the village houses were rectangular with packed clay floors.

In the end, I highly recommend that anyone interested in Alabama history, get a copy of this book. Also, if anyone in the reading audience knows of other ancient Indian sites in Wilcox County, please let me know. No doubt there are many others in the deep woods along the Alabama River and elsewhere just waiting to be documented.