As Mississippian Indian sites go, what is the importance of Bottle Creek?
It was the capital of the region, basically – the administrative, religious, ceremonial, political, economic center of not only southwest Alabama, but the Gulf Coast. We see related sites extending as far east as Pensacola Bay and as far west as the coast of Louisiana, and then up both the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers quite a distance. It was extremely important from about 1200 A.D. to probably about the time of Spanish contact in the 1500s, when it began to decline. Explain the purpose of the mounds at Bottle Creek. What it represents, really, is a symbol of authority. If you lived on top of a mound like that, then you had the power to command a lot of people to move a lot of dirt with stone tools and baskets, a basketload at a time, to pile that dirt up into a mound that’s over 50 feet high. That’s a lot of power, which is one thing it represents. The larger mounds would have supported the residence of the chief, the priest and other high-ranking officials. It’s probable that the maj
