People whose descendants reached this part of Mississippi nearly 12,000 years ago eventually built mounds in the state, first as hunters and gatherers and later as prehistoric farmers. The Owl Creek Mounds site was built and used by farming people of the Mississippian culture from A.D. 1000 to 1500. It consists of five mounds arranged around a central open area, with Mounds I and II publicly owned and Mounds III, IV, and V on private land. In 1805, Dr. Rush Nutt wrote that all five mounds were flat on top, but today only Mound I remains close to its prehistoric appearance. Plowing and planting continued there as late as the 1960s, changing the mounds’ shape and size, and road widening cut away part of Mound V. People probably gathered at the mounds for special events while living in small farmsteads on high ground along Chuquatonchee, Tallabinnela, Tubbalubba, and nearby creeks, leaving shell-tempered pottery and other everyday artifacts that archaeologists have found at some residential sites. A ground stone axe found in Goodfood Creek near the mounds was made from fragile limonite and was probably a ceremonial object, perhaps a symbol of an important leader connected with ceremonies there. Owl Creek is significant because it shows massive construction in the early Mississippian period, was the largest mound site in a region of thousands of square miles during its use, and was abandoned after only about a hundred years, leaving the ceremonies held there and the reason for its abandonment unknown.
