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The Bottle Creek site (1Ba2) is located in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, Baldwin County, Alabama. This multi-mound Pensacola culture site was erected on the northern end of Mound Island, sandwiched between Middle River and Bottle Creek. David L. DeJarnette of the Alabama Museum of Natural History conducted preliminary investigations in 1932 and this museum has continued its interest in the site in the 1990s through the work of the Gulf Coast Survey.1 Major excavations were undertaken in 1993–94 under the title “The Bottle Creek Project.” Although I was the principal investigator for the project, this has been a team effort through and through. All of the people included as authors in this book have been deeply involved in the Bottle Creek Project right from the very beginning. This volume is a culmination of their work. Based on the number of mounds and their size and extent, Bottle Creek is the largest Mississippian site in the region. It is situated on Mound Island , a large, generally swampy tract in the heart of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (Figures 1.1–1.2). The site has at least 18 mounds plus various associated non-mound habitation areas and midden deposits (Figure 1.3). The linear distance between Mound O on the east and Mound R on the west is approximately one kilometer. The main mound complex consists of a central plaza outlined by mounds A, B, L, M, and N. A is the principal mound, and is quite an impressive edi¤ce. It is a ®at-topped, pyramidal mound, approximately 14 m tall. Mound B is a long, linear mound of rather un1 / Introduction to the Bottle Creek Site Ian W. Brown 1. The Gulf Coast Survey is an archaeological program of the Alabama Museum of Natural History. It is under my direction as Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Gulf Coast Archaeology. The GCS occupies four of¤ces on the fourth ®oor of the Mary Harmon Bryant Hall at the University of Alabama and a lab on the third ®oor. Its research focuses on the prehistory and history of the northern Gulf Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States. My students and I currently are conducting ¤eld projects in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. usual shape, in that it may have been terraced prehistorically (Figure 1.4). It certainly is so now as the northern half of the mound has a broad platform extending in the direction of Mound A. Around the northern periphery of the site is a line of house mounds. These grew slowly through time by the accumulation of midden. Bottle Creek was occupied primarily between a.d. 1250 and 1550 during what is referred to as the Pensacola culture (Figure 1.5). It probably served as the principal center for the region during these three centuries, in terms of politics, religion and trade. There is some evidence of earlier occupation, and Indians continued to occupy the site well into the eighteenth century. 1.1. Location of the Bottle Creek site in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, Alabama (from the Mound Island Project, by Fuller and Brown, copyright 1998 by the Alabama Museum of Natural History, used by permission). 2 / Ian W. Brown The site also experienced considerable settlement and use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. THE BOTTLE CREEK SITE AND PENSACOLA CULTURE These investigations and accounts of the Bottle Creek site indicate that this ceremonial center, in size and magnitude of construction, ranks second only to the great center at Moundville and represents one of the major protohistoric sites in Alabama and the Southeast. Walthall 1980:269 The principal occupation at Bottle Creek was by people of the Pensacola culture (a.d. 1250–1700). Pensacola culture is an archaeological variant of the widespread Mississippian tradition. It is identi¤ed by a shell-tempered 1.2. The Mound Island region, with Bottle Creek as site no. 10 (from the Mound Island Project, by Fuller and Brown, copyright 1998 by the Alabama Museum of Natural History, used by permission). Introduction to the Bottle Creek Site / 3 1.3. Contour map of the Bottle Creek site (courtesy of Gregory A. Waselkov, Center for Archaeological Studies, University of South Alabama, used by permission). 1.4. An early map of the Bottle Creek site by A. Bigelow (1853). 1.5. Chronology of Indian culture in southwest Alabama, 1400 b.c. to Historic (from the Mound Island Project, by Fuller and Brown, copyright 1998 by the Alabama Museum of Natural History, used...

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