Visit Indigenous Landscapes: Mounds, Rock Art and Ancient Towns Across the U.S.

Indigenous peoples, Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, were the first to put down roots in the Americas. Archeology opens a window onto their lives long ago and onto change across the continent, from shifts in the environment to the effects of contact between cultures; the record it reveals links past peoples to living communities. Here are places to start: national parks, state and local parks, and National Register and National Historic Landmark properties. Many are sacred to living peoples, and all are part of an irreplaceable heritage; please visit with respect.

Alaska

• Gates of the Arctic: people have lived in the Brooks Range for more than 13,000 years, and Athapaskan and Inupiat descendants live there today. Thousands of sites record their ties to the land.
• Lake Clark: the lake's original name, Qizhjeh Vena, means "a place where people gathered" in Dena'ina Athabascan. The Dena'ina have lived here for thousands of years; explorers, missionaries, prospectors, trappers and traders began arriving in the 18th century.

Midwest

Effigy Mounds National Monument. NPS photo.

• Cahokia Mounds, Illinois: a World Heritage Site and once the largest Indigenous city in what is now the United States, with remains of houses, monumental public works and structures aligned with the equinox sun.
• Millstone Bluff, Shawnee National Forest, Illinois: between 1350 and 1550 CE, Mississippian people built semi-underground homes here and carved petroglyphs into the sandstone, figures thought to matter to their religion and identity.
• Angel Mounds, Indiana: a Mississippian town of more than 1,000 people, built between A.D. 1000 and 1450, with 11 earthen platform mounds on 103 acres; a religious, political and trade centre for people within 75 miles.
• Effigy Mounds, Iowa: over 200 mounds built about 650–1200 CE, 31 of them shaped like birds and bears, studied with aerial photography, LIDAR and ground-penetrating radar.
• Sanilac Petroglyphs, Michigan: the only known Native American rock carvings in Michigan's Lower Peninsula, 300 to 1,200 years old: swirls, lines, handprints, birds in flight and bowmen.
• Hopewell Culture, Ohio: five major earthworks almost 2,000 years old, three open to the public, with a self-guided tour on the NPS app and a visitor centre showing finds such as effigy pipes.
• Newark Earthworks, Ohio: the largest set of geometric earthworks in the world (the Great Circle, Octagon and Wright Earthworks), perhaps used by the Hopewell for gatherings and, some researchers argue, for watching the sky.
• Serpent Mound, Ohio: the Fort Ancient culture's serpent effigy, whose head lines up with the summer solstice sunset, with a museum on its archeology and geology.
• SunWatch Indian Village, Dayton, Ohio: a partly reconstructed Fort Ancient village on the Great Miami River. The Fort Ancient people, the area's first intensive farmers, lived in the Middle Ohio Valley from about A.D. 1000 to 1650; digging began in the 1960s and continues.

Pacific West

The Coso Rock Art District. Image from the National Park Service's page.

• Chumash Painted Cave, California: a small sandstone cave with some of the finest surviving Chumash rock art, from 1600 and earlier, now recorded in a detailed 3D laser scan.
• Coso Rock Art District, California: a National Historic Landmark inside the Navy's China Lake testing station, with over 20,000 recorded images.
• Hawai'i Volcanoes: five centuries ago, thriving family communities ('ohana) lived on this lava landscape, leaving house platforms, caves and petroglyphs. An audio tour on the NPS app follows the kūpuna (elders) to Pu'uloa, the "hill of long life."
• Kalaupapa, Hawai'i: best known for its Hansen's disease settlement, but the peninsula and valleys are rich in sites, which early accounts describe spanning its whole width. A permit is required to enter.
• Indian Painted Rocks, Washington: well-preserved pictographs about 250 years old, a reminder of the Spokane people's long presence in the Inland Northwest.

Southeast

Ocmulgee National Monument. NPS photo.

• Russell Cave, Alabama: one of the oldest rock shelters in the eastern United States, used for about 12,000 years; its finds show how projectile points and basketry changed over time.
• Everglades, Florida: the Calusa, a chiefdom of many small villages, held Florida's southwest coast from west of Lake Okeechobee to Cape Sable, living mostly by fishing. See shell mounds, tree islands and canals.
• Miami Circle, Florida: found in 1998, believed to be the only prehistoric structural footprint cut into rock in America, likely made by the Tequesta, who lived in southeast Florida from about 500 BCE until Spain handed Florida to Britain in 1763. The circle is buried for protection beneath a park.
• Ocmulgee, Georgia: 17,000 years of continuous human habitation and great earthen mounds; America's largest-ever excavation took place here in 1933–1936, and some finds are in the museum.
• Poverty Point, Louisiana: a World Heritage Site since 2014, with a 72-foot mound and huge concentric half-circles. Stones brought from over 800 miles away show it was a place to live, trade and hold ceremonies thousands of years ago.

Southwest

Rock art at Amistad National Recreation Area. NPS photo.

Arizona

• Canyon de Chelly: Ancestral Puebloans farmed the canyons and built pit houses and homes in the rock alcoves; Hopi and Navajo people followed.
• Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve: a museum and 47-acre desert preserve with more than 1,500 symbols pecked into basalt by Archaic, Hohokam and Patayan peoples, the largest concentration in the Phoenix area.
• Montezuma Castle: Southern Sinagua cliff dwellings built between A.D. 1100 and 1425, among the best preserved in the Southwest.
• Petrified Forest: more than 13,000 years of human history, with petroglyphs and pueblo sites.

Colorado and New Mexico

• Mesa Verde: home to Ancestral Pueblo people for over 700 years, from 600 to 1300 CE; nearly 5,000 known sites, including 600 cliff dwellings, and an audio tour by Ranger TJ Atsye on the NPS app.
• Chaco Culture: by 1050 CE the ceremonial, administrative and economic centre of the San Juan Basin, with great houses, astronomical markers, water control works and earthen mounds.
• Petroglyph National Monument: one of North America's largest petroglyph sites, carved 400 to 700 years ago by Native Americans and Spanish settlers, sacred still to their descendants.

Nevada

• Grimes Point–Hidden Cave: petroglyphs along a quarter-mile trail, and a cave used for storage between 3,500 and 3,800 years ago.
• Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area: carvings from around 10,000 years ago, perhaps tied to ritual or hunting, with a Bureau of Land Management trail and campground.
• Valley of Fire: 40,000 acres of red sandstone with petrified trees and petroglyphs more than 2,000 years old.

Texas

• Amistad: the Lower Pecos region holds more than 2,000 sites spanning over 10,000 years, over 325 with pictographs, some panels more than 100 feet long; tours of Seminole Canyon, Parida Cave, Panther Cave and White Shaman Preserve.
• Hueco Tanks: water, food and shelter in the Chihuahuan Desert for 10,000 years; Jornada Mogollon people began farming here around A.D. 1150 and left pictographs and petroglyphs.
• Lower Pecos rock art dates back at least 4,500 years; at Seminole Canyon, Lower Pecos River Style pictographs of about 4,000 years ago fill the rock shelters.

Utah and Wyoming

• Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands: finds from as early as 9000–7000 BCE, when Paleoindians hunted mammoths and mastodons, and the Great Gallery's life-sized painted figures.
• Capitol Reef: Fremont and Ancestral Pueblo people, about 300–1300 CE, left pictographs, petroglyphs, pithouses and a distinctive basketry.
• Glen Canyon: Defiance House, built 1250–1285 CE, named for its paintings of men with clubs and shields.
• Natural Bridges: hunter-gatherers from 7000 BCE, and ancestors of today's Pueblo people on the mesa tops from around 700 CE.
• Parowan Gap: over 1,500 carvings on more than 90 panels, mostly by Fremont people 700 to 1,500 years ago, still important to the Paiute and Hopi.
• Legend Rock, Wyoming: a sacred site for thousands of years, with more than 92 petroglyph panels and over 300 figures on a cliff 400 meters long.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Visit Indigenous Landscapes." https://www.nps.gov/articles/visit-indigenous-landscapes.htm
• Corrected: "Ocmulguee" to "Ocmulgee", "varvings" to "carvings". The original's entry for Arches National Park repeats the Lower Pecos text and is left out, and its Grimes Point entry, printed twice, appears once.