08/14/2026
Did you know…
📌 Adams Site — Fulton County, Kentucky
📍 36.601498° N, 89.104169° W
This Mississippian center wasn't seriously studied by archaeologists until nearly a century after it was first written about.
The Adams Site is a major Mississippian mound center near Hickman, Kentucky, sitting on an isolated terrace in the lower Bayou de Chien Valley, not far from the Mississippi River. The site covers roughly 18 acres, naturally bounded by a stream, swamp, and slough. It was first described back in 1888, but professional archaeological work didn't begin until 1983, when researchers from the University of Illinois took a closer look.
Adams was built over an earlier Late Woodland occupation before developing into an important Mississippian administrative center. Evidence documents occupation during both the Dorena phase, roughly AD 1100 to 1300, and the later Medley phase, AD 1300 to 1500, with radiocarbon samples spanning the eleventh through fifteenth centuries overall.
The settlement was organized around a central plaza ringed by platform and conical mounds, with two distinct village areas, one east of the plaza and another southwest of the main platform mound. Houses appear to have been spaced roughly 25 to 30 meters apart. Archaeologists also found unusually deep midden deposits, 1 to 1.5 meters thick, along with layers of superimposed wall-trench houses, pits, and fire basins, clear evidence of substantial, repeated occupation over generations.
People living at Adams practiced a mixed economy of farming, hunting, and gathering, cultivating maize, beans, squash, and gourds, gathering persimmons, hickory nuts, and wild seeds, and hunting deer, raccoon, turkey, turtles, and fish. Recovered artifacts include Mississippi Plain and Bell Plain pottery, decorated incised ceramics, earspools, pins, projectile points, drills, sandstone abraders, metates, adze fragments, and bone awls.
Today, the site's earthworks come through especially clearly in LiDAR, which reveals the mounds, plaza, and surrounding terrain beneath the vegetation far better than conventional aerial imagery ever could.
