Wickliffe Mounds Mississippian village Ballard County

The Kentucky Archaeological Survey also calls it the cross-and-circle; the cross sits on a white ground inside the ring, and the symbol appears widely in Mississippian art, including on pottery.

Around 1100 CE, Mississippian farmers (part of a corn-growing culture that built mound towns across the Mississippi Valley) settled on a bluff above the meeting of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, at today's Wickliffe in Ballard County. Their first village was compact, with houses clustered around an open plaza. Soon afterward, residents began raising Mounds A and B, flat-topped platform mounds that served as earthen bases for important buildings.

Most of the mound building happened between about 1175 and 1250. New households moved in, the community spread north and south, and the platform mounds grew in stages. A third mound, Mound C, became a cemetery soon after it was built.

From 1250 to 1350 residents added four burial mounds, and the town reached the edge of the bluffs, covering about 7 acres. By 1350 they had capped the mounds and left.

In the 1930s, local archaeologists dug the site and developed it as a tourist attraction called "Ancient Buried City." Murray State University took it over in the early 1980s and renamed it Wickliffe Mounds Research Center. It joined the Kentucky state parks system in 2004 as Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site.

Today the mounds and a museum of artifacts excavated on site are open to visitors at the state historic site on the edge of Wickliffe. Find it on the map, or add it to a western Kentucky drive.

Sources: Kentucky Archaeological Survey, Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site (opens in a new tab); National Park Service, Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site (opens in a new tab)