Moundville was a major Mississippian center on the Black Warrior River near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, occupied from about AD 1000 to 1450 and transformed after about 1150 into the political and ceremonial heart of the Province of Pafalaya. Its preserved 185-acre core includes 29 platform mounds around a rectangular plaza, part of a larger fortified complex that once held a dense population and a highly ordered social landscape. Archaeological work has revealed extensive buildings, rich pottery, stonework, embossed copper, and long-distance trade goods. By about 1300 it had become more a religious and political center than a residential town, and it was largely abandoned by 1500.