"I" is for Indian Mounds

"I" is for Indian Mounds. Dotting South Carolina’s streams and rivers are vestiges of her prehistoric past. These mounds offer fragmentary evidence of the cultures that thrived before the Europeans arrived. At least sixteen Woodland mounds and nineteen Mississippian mounds have been identified that are at least fifty percent intact. Another eleven known sites have been destroyed or are underwater. Woodland period mounds are located primarily along coastal rivers while Mississippian mounds are found on inland rivers near the fall line. In the late prehistoric period and early contact period, some of South Carolina’s mound builders were part of vast Mississippian chiefdoms. These mounds, built between C.E. 1200 and 1500, were ceremonial, cultural, or administrative in nature and at times were associated with villages and burials. Historic evidence suggests that as many as 150 mounds were present in South Carolina at the time of European contact.