Cahawba - circa 1500

Long before Cahawba was built as Alabama's first state capital, another village stood at this location. About the year 1500, a group of Native Americans migrated up the Alabama River from the coast, stopped here, and built a fortified, walled village surrounded by a moat, whose remnant remains as a ditch. This community thrived for about 50 years and then disappeared. Its 16th century residents were not Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, or Chickasaw, though they may have been ancestors of one or more of these modern American Indian nations. Archaeologists call these early Cahawba residents Late Mississippians, and archaeological evidence suggests that the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto played a role in their disappearance about 1540.

Alabama · United States