Centered around Boiling Spring, the Choccolocco Creek Archaeological Complex once included at least three earthen mounds, a large stone mound, and a large snake effigy made of stone. The largest earthen mound once rose high above the Choccolocco Creek floodplain. The earliest mound construction began during the Middle Woodland period, about 100 B.C. to A.D. 250, when the site became a regionally important ritual center associated with peoples from the Gulf Coast to the Tennessee Valley. Mound construction appears to have resumed around A.D. 1100, when the inhabitants of this area were closely connected with the people of the Etowah site near Cartersville, Georgia. Before the 1830s, the site was the ceremonial ground of the Abihkas, one of the most ancient tribal towns within the modern Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Ethnographic research by the Smithsonian Institution indicates that the stone constructions are associated with oral histories telling of a town lost in the water. The large stone mound is thought to have resulted from burden stones carried by the Abihka in remembrance of those lost in a great flood. The site remains important to numerous Southeastern Indigenous tribes who assert an ancestral connection with those who built and occupied Alabama's ancient mounds, and its earthworks, objects, and recovered information reveal a rich cultural tradition that still thrives today among these tribes.