Between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1300, a Mississippian village prospered at what is now known as Sellars Farm, in the bend of Spring Creek southeast of Lebanon, Tennessee, along an important trade route to other villages in the Middle Cumberland River valley. The village, about 900 feet by 850 feet and ten acres in size, was part of the most advanced prehistoric culture to develop within what became the United States, a farming society supported by maize, squash, beans, and other crops and supplemented by hunting. A fifteen-foot-high platform mound supported an important governmental or religious building, a plaza served public ceremonies, events, and games, and houses stood within a complex system of earthen walls, ditch, and wooden palisade with bastions and three entries. Stone-lined graves, including sixty-one burials in a burial mound, large stone statuary, pottery, and marine shell artwork show a stratified and sophisticated society with leaders of elevated rank, sacred spaces, and ceremonies that may have honored ancestors or promoted fertility. The village's people lived by the rhythms of nature, traded exotic shells and copper, and likely faced occasional conflict with neighboring peoples. Four stone human effigy statues later found in nearby fields are among the finest discovered in the United States. By A.D. 1500, towns of this culture in Middle Tennessee were abandoned, and when European settlers arrived in the 1700s, the region was largely uninhabited by native peoples and used as a shared hunting reserve by tribes including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Shawnee.