The Lamar Mounds and Village Site is an important archaeological site on the banks of the Ocmulgee River in Bibb County, Georgia and several miles to the southeast of the Ocmulgee Mound Site. Both mound sites are part of the Ocmulgee National Monument, a national park and historic district created in 1936 and run by the U.S. National Park Service. Historians and archaeologists have theorized that the site is the location of the main village of the Ichisi encountered by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1539.
Site description
The site has two large platform mounds and an associated village area surrounded by a palisade. The original settlement may have been started on a natural levee of the Ocmulgee River, a location which eventually became Mound A. The main village area spreads out to the southeast from this location. This location may have been island-like at the time of its settlement, the only high ground located in a low swampy area with the Ocmulgee River on one side and an oxbow lake on the other. Houses in the village were rectangular wattle and daub structures, some situated on low house mounds, and the palisade was made of upright logs covered in clay. The palisade encircled an area of about and followed the island shape of the raised levee. Outside of the palisade was an encircling ditch, probably water filled at the time of the sites occupation. Mound A is a large mound with a round in diameter and deep depression located in the northwestern quadrant of its summit. This feature is thought to be the remnants of a collapsed earth lodge with a dugout floor and embanked walls. Unlike other Middle Mississippian culture mounds to the northwest, Lamar-style mounds are more rounded in shape as compared to squared-off rectangles. Mound B, completely round in shape, has a feature almost unique in southeastern archaeology in that it has a spiral ramp leading to its summit. This and other evidence has led archaeologists to speculate that the mound was in the process of being enlarged and given a new layer of fill when work was abruptly stopped. Unlike other Mississippian sites, no evidence of a meticulously clean plaza has been found at the site, although the large area between mounds was once theorized to be one. Two large pits were made at the site, one inside the palisade and the other outside its perimeter. These were probably borrow pits left over from mound construction. It is possible the inhabitants used the pits as clean water reservoirs and fish ponds, a use described by the De Soto chroniclers when passing through the area.
Lamar culture
The Lamar site was inhabited from about 1350 to 1600 CE, during the late prehistoric and early historic period of the area. The style of Mississippian culture pottery found at the site has been used to define this period in the regional chronology, making it the type site for the Lamar culture.
Excavations
In 1936 the site was acquired by the United States government and incorporated into the new Ocmulgee National Monument. It was then extensively excavated during the late 1930s as part of the government's Depression eraWorks Progress Administration archaeology program. The site saw a series of major archaeological excavations starting with one by James A. Ford in 1934, Arthur R. Kelly in 1936, Gordon Willey in 1938, and in 1939-1940 by Jesse Jennings and Charles Fairbanks. To protect the site from the flooding Ocmulgee River a large levee was constructed around it in 1941. In 1996 archaeologist Mark Williams from the University of Georgia and the Lamar Institute did test excavations and site mapping, the first archaeological explorations at the site since 1940.
Possible location of Ichisi
On March 29, 1539, the Hernando de Soto entrada, while winding its way northward after leaving Florida, came upon the province of Ichisi, which may have been part of the larger paramount chiefdom of Ocute. They were greeted, at the first village, by women dressed in white mantles with gifts of corn cakes and wild onions. On March 30 they were ferried across the Ocmulgee River in dugout canoes and met by the paramount chief of the province, a man with only one good eye. They spent several days at the village as the guest of the one-eyed ruler. The chief gave de Soto gifts of food and offered him porters and translators to speed him on to the next chiefdom to the northeast, Ocute, a people who spoke a different language from the Ichisi. Before leaving on April 1, the Spaniards erected a large wooden cross atop one of the village mounds and tried to explain its significance to the villagers. Noted historian and de Soto researcher Charles M. Hudson theorized in the 1980s and 90s, that the de Soto entrada crossed the Ocmulgee River near Macon and that the Lamar Mounds may have been the location of the paramount town of the Ichisi, a view supported by archaeologists who have worked at the site. New archaeological work at a site in rural Telfair County, Georgia near the town of McRae in 2009 called this identification into question and suggested the crossing took place approximately further south. Archaeologists and historians are still debating which of the two sites was actually visited by de Soto and his men.
Lamar name
The mounds are located on plantation land that was owned by John Basil Lamar. After his death in the Civil War the property remained in the Lamar family and part of the former plantation that includes the mounds was sold to the United States in 1936 as recorded in "Lamar Archaeology", Mark Williams and Gary Shapiro, University of Alabama Press.
