Bottle Creek Site

bottle creek

Bottle Creek, the largest Mississippian site (AD 1200 to 1450) on the north-central Gulf coast, has eighteen earthen mounds that served as platforms for houses and temples.

The largest, Mound A, stands about 45 feet high. Bottle Creek is one of the few major Mississippian sites not yet developed for tourism. The heavily forested site, in the midst of the Mobile-Tensaw delta, gives visitors a sense of the rich natural environment that supported Native American societies for thousands of years - and which we are now altering so drastically.

Approaching a mound at the Bottle Creek site.

The McMillan family protected the Bottle Creek site for most of this century. In the early 1990s the land was purchased by Scott Paper Company, which in turn donated the site to the State of Alabama. Now administered as a preserve by the Alabama Historical Commission, the site is patrolled to prevent vandalism.

The natural beauty of the Mobile/Tensaw delta.

A team from the University of South Alabama produced this map of Bottle Creek in 1990, which has been updated periodically.

Between 1991 and 1994, the University of Alabama conducted the first intensive excavations at Bottle Creek. Those explorations uncovered some of the few prehistoric and historic Indian house floors found in this part of the Gulf coast, as well as evidence of mound construction methods.

In November of 2003 nearly 100 people joined USA archaeologists Dr. Greg Waselkov and Bonnie Gums on boat tours to visit the Bottle Creek mounds. Want to find out more?

To read more about the Bottle Creek site, see Bottle Creek, a Pensacola Culture Site in South Alabama, edited by Ian W. Brown, published in 2003 by the University of Alabama Press, and Bottle Creek Research, Journal of Alabama Archaeology 32(1992, 1-2), edited by Ian W. Brown and Richard S. Fuller.