According to Creek tradition, Ocmulgee was the site of the first permanent Creek settlement after migration of the tribe from the West.

Ocmulgee is a memorial to the antiquity of man in this corner of the North American continent. From Ice-Age hunters to the Creeks of historic times, there is evidence here of 10,000 years of human habitation. One period stands out. Between AD 900 and 1100 a skillful farming people lived on this site. Known to us as Mississippians, they were part of a distinctive culture which crystallized about AD 750 in the middle Mississippi Valley and over the next seven centuries spread along riverways throughout much of the central and eastern United States. The Mississippians brought a more complex way of life to the region. Though far removed from such Mississippian centers as Cahokia in Illinois and Moundville in Alabama, the people here were the heirs of an ascendant culture and enjoyed a life as rich as any north of Mexico.

The Mississippians at Ocmulgee were intruders of a sort. They apparently displaced the native woodland Indians, though there is no evidence of conflict. The newcomers were a sedentary people who lived mainly by farming bottomlands for crops of corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and tobacco. They built a compact town of thatched huts on the bluff overlooking the river. More than a thousand persons lived here at one time. For their public ceremonies, they leveled an area near the river and began constructing a series of earth mounds-places important in their religion and politics. They did not build the mounds to full height all at once but raised them at intervals over the years, perhaps as new leaders came to power or in response to cycles about which we can only speculate.

Another structure central to life here was the earthlodge. There were several at Ocmulgee. The one best preserved has been reconstructed. It is 42-feet in diameter. Opposite the entrance is a clay platform shaped like a large bird. There are three seats on the platform and 47 on the bench around the wall. In the center of the lodge is a firepit. This building may have been either a winter temple or a year-round council house. The 50 or so persons who met here were probably the group's leaders.

The mound on the town's west side was apparently a place for burials. Like the temple mounds, the Funeral Mound was flat topped and equipped with steps leading up the side to some kind of mortuary building. More than 100 burials have been found here. Some had elaborate shell and copper ornaments, suggesting high status, but most had no offerings.

The Mississippians seem to have had some influence on the surrounding population (mound- building, rudimentary farming), but we are far from knowing the real nature of the transactions between them. Nor do we know why the town declined or what happened to the inhabitants- whether they died out, migrated elsewhere, or were assimilated. Whatever their fate, by 1100 Ocmulgeewas no longer a thriving outpost of Mississippian culture.

Over the next two centuries, the native Indians, their style of life irrevocably altered, made occasional use of the old townsite. Then in the 1300s a new culture arose and spread widely through the Southeast. Known as the Lamar culture, it appears to have been a blending of Mississippian and Woodland elements. The Lamar people were farmers, skilled hunters, and mound-builders whose distinctive pottery employed designs peculiar to both their Woodland and Mississippian predecessors. They also made some use of the old town site, then fallen into ruins. One of their major centers was the Lamar site, several miles away in the swamps along the Ocmulgee River. This village contained two temple mounds and was surrounded by a stockade. It was the Lamar people that Hernando de Soto encountered in 1540 on the first European expedition into this region.

The arrival of Europeans was catastrophic for the natives. Disease caused staggering losses, and they were drawn into the white man's trading world and his political disputes, with a corresponding collapse of their traditional way of life. The English set up a trading post at Ocmulgee sometime around 1690, and Creeks settled here in numbers. By 1715 the site was again abandoned as warfare between English and Spanish colonials inflamed the frontier. Within a few decades there were few vestiges of Mississippian life anywhere and virtually no understanding of the culture. When the pioneer naturalist William Bartram saw Ocmulgee in the 1770s, he spoke with respect mingled with incomprehension of "the wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients in this part of America."

Visiting the Monument

Village site - During Mississippian times (AD 900-1100) many other structures stood here besides the earth lodge, among them several flat-topped mounds, a burial mound, and numerous huts.

Cornfield Mound was originally about 8 feet high. Under it archeologists found signs of a cultivated field, which is something of a puzzle because Mississippian agricultural fields usually lay in bottomlands. The mound itself was probably a platform for a ceremonial building.

Prehistoric trenches - Two lines of ditches varying in width and depth have been traced around the east side of the village. Some sections are parallel and lined with clay. The ditches may have been defensive or they may have been borrow pits sources of fill for constructing mounds.

Trading post - English traders from Charleston, eager to do business with the Creeks, built the first trading post on this site about 1690. They traded firearms, cloth, and trinkets for deerskins and furs. Excavations have turned up all sorts of goods, including axes, clay pipes, beads, knives, swords, bullets, flints, and pistols and muskets.

Great and Lesser Temple Mounds - Relatively little is known about these mounds except that they were topped by rectangular wooden structures that were probably used for important religious ceremonies. Great Temple Mound is by far the largest Mississippian mound on the Macon Plateau. Lesser Temple Mound was partly destroyed by railroad construction in the 1840s.