Tolu Site: Mississippian Mounds in Crittenden County

Its builders were farmers who raised mounds and lived there for generations before European contact. The site is best known for a carved stone figure, one of the finest of its kind.

Dates and mounds

According to an account of the Tolu Site (opens in a new tab), the town was built and occupied between 1200 and 1450 CE. No carbon dating has been done there, so its timeline rests on pottery. Pottery styles suggest the main period of life at the site ran from 1200 to 1300 CE.

The site once had three mounds. One was a burial mound, one a substructure platform mound that raised an important building, and the third is of unknown purpose. W. S. Webb and William D. Funkhouser excavated the site in 1930.

Part of a wider Mississippian world

Archaeologists place Tolu in the Angel phase of the Mississippian period. Because its pottery and town plan resemble those of three other sites, an account of the Tolu Site says some archaeologists group it in a "Kincaid Set." The others are Angel Mounds in Indiana, Kincaid Mounds in Illinois.

Sources give different dates for this wider group. An account of the Angel phase (opens in a new tab) dates Angel phase sites to about 1050–1350 CE, while the Tolu article runs the town's occupation to 1450. The Angel phase article notes that the likeness between Kincaid and Angel has led some experts to suggest their people were one society. Kincaid Mounds (opens in a new tab) had its main occupation about 1050–1400 and had at least nine flat-topped mounds around a central plaza.

The fluorite statue

In May 1954 a local farmer plowing a field in the area found a statue carved from greyish white fluorite. An account of Mississippian stone statuary (opens in a new tab) instead describes it as discovered in the Tolu Site. Both rely on Smith and Miller's 2009 study of the region's stone statuary.

The 25-centimeter figure is among the most detailed Mississippian stone statues known. It is the only known statue of the Tennessee-Cumberland style with a beaded forelock. That hairstyle appears often in other Mississippian art, most notably engraved mussel shells. A similar fluorite statue came from Mound F at Angel Mounds in 1940.