Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park preserves about 12,000 years of continuous Indigenous habitation along the Ocmulgee River at Macon, Georgia. Its most prominent remains come from the Macon Plateau culture, part of the South Appalachian Mississippian world, which built major platform mounds, ceremonial spaces, defensive works, and an earth lodge before 1000 CE. After that center declined, later communities occupied the nearby Lamar site. Sacred in Muscogee tradition as “the place where we first sat down,” the landscape also reflects colonial trade, the growth of Macon after nearby Fort Benjamin Hawkins, and modern preservation. It remains a major Southeastern mound center linking archaeology, Native tradition, and later American history.