An earthen mound and adjacent village at this strategic site near the meeting of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, where they form the Alabama River, were built by people of the Mississippian culture, who likely had some relationship to the major mound center at Moundville near present-day Tuscaloosa. The Mississippian culture is believed to have originated in the Mississippi River Valley near the end of the first millennium A.D. around 1050 and remained the dominant culture of the Southeast until European exploration and settlement from 1511 to 1700. From sandy, well-drained soil forty feet above the river, a location that seldom floods, the village's inhabitants could control movement of people and goods along the rivers, giving them economic and political control as well as cultural influence over a massive area. The site became one of the most intensively occupied indigenous places in Alabama and remained a significant center of American Indian occupation until the removal of the Creek Indians in the 1830s. In the Historic period, the Alabama and Muscogee Creek villages of Pakana and Taskigi were also located here. The site remains important to numerous Southeastern indigenous tribes who assert an ancestral connection to its builders and occupants, and its earthworks, objects, and recovered information reveal a rich cultural tradition that still thrives today. Around 1400 to 1500, the site likely included a platform mound with a summit structure, a large central plaza surrounded by houses and other buildings, a defensive timber palisade, a borrow pit, and nearby cultivated fields of corn, beans, squash, sunflower, amaranth, and other food crops.