Reassessing Winterville Mounds
Winterville Mounds was occupied for centuries and during this time it underwent dramatic changes. Ed Jackson is the latest of a number of archaeologists who have tried to understand what took place there.
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s an afternoon storm threatens to rend the stagnant summer air, Ed Jackson makes a discovery not much bigger than the size of a raindrop. He has found a manufactured bead stuck in a fragment of burnt daub, and the distant past jolts to life for the University of Southern Mississippi archaeologist. “All I can imagine is a woman plastering the wall of the house, getting her necklace stuck, and losing the bead,” he says, excited over the tiny object and its larger implications.
Jackson is leading a team of 13 students that is excavating the prehistoric mound site of Winterville in the Yazoo Basin of the Lower Mississippi Valley (also known as the Delta of blues lore). Located on Highway 1, about five miles north of Greenville and slightly south of its namesake town, Winterville contains evidence of 23 platform mounds, nine of which are intact. Organized in an oval pattern with a northeast-to-southwest axis, Winterville has two ceremonial plazas, whereas most
Mound A is the largest structure at Winterville.
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fall • 2011
